SMP; autoboot

[Peter Grehan]

Hi Ben,

> 1. Is SMP supported on freebsd-ppc?

  Nope :(

  It may not be too difficult. The ppc port is mostly based on the 
sparc64 port so all the synchronization primitives are there. I 
personally don't have any MP h/w.

> 2. What can I put in my NVRAM settings to make the system boot to
>    FreeBSD?  As it is, I have auto-boot?=false, and when
>    the OF prompt comes up, I type "boot hd:loader hd:6".  hd:6 is an
>    HFS+ filesystem which contains just one file, "loader".  This is
>    not too bad, but it'd be pretty cool if I could autoboot to FreeBSD.
>    Bonus points if there's a menu along the way that lets me select
>    Mac OS X, which lives on the second HDD.  I played around with
>    things like setting boot-command=boot and boot-args="hd:loader hd:6",
>    but all I ever got was a boot to Mac OS X or to a blank screen.

  There's been some discussion and experimentation with this. Have a 
look at Dario Freni's blog, 'FreeBSD on the Mac Mini', and how he 
created a CHRP boot script.

   http://blog.freesbie.org/blogs/

  and a from the freebsd-ppc archives:
     http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2005-January/000830.html

later,

Peter.