Booting FreeBSD/powerpc from external FireWire drive?

[Paul Mather]

On Oct 1, 2010, at 4:05 PM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Oct 2010 11:44:05 -0400
> Paul Mather <paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu> wrote:
> 
>> I'm trying to install FreeBSD/powerpc{,64} on an external FireWire
>> drive.  I've been successful in installing a 9-CURRENT snapshot.  The
>> problem is that I don't know how to boot from this drive from
>> OpenFirmware, given I also have Mac OS X installed on a separate hard
>> drive---the internal hard drive that is the default boot drive.
>> 
>> Using a PowerBook G4, I was able to boot the external FW drive
>> containing FreeBSD by holding down the Option key during startup and
>> then choosing the FreeBSD drive from the list of bootable drives that
>> is displayed.  Unfortunately, I want to use this external FW drive to
>> boot into FreeBSD on an headless Xserve G5 via a serial console.
>> Lacking the graphical boot drive chooser, I need to use the
>> OpenFirmware "boot" command or set the boot-device in NVRAM to
>> designate the external FW drive as the boot drive.
>> 
>> Can anyone help me figure out the appropriate OpenFirmware command to
>> boot FreeBSD from the external FW drive?  The "devalias" command
>> reports I have "fw" and "fwx" aliases, which I presume refer to
>> FireWire.  Alas, I can't fathom what the boot command arguments would
>> be.  I followed the gpart partitioning scheme listed in the
>> FreeBSD/powerpc install instructions at
>> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/ppcinstall.txt with an 800K
>> apple-boot partition as the first one in the APM.
>> 
>> If it would make it easier, the external FW drive I have can also be
>> used as a USB drive.  So, if it is easier to boot from an external
>> USB, I could do that, if someone can tell me the appropriate boot
>> arguments.
> 
> boot fw:,\\:tbxi or boot fw:,\ppc\boot1.elf might also work.

Neither of these works for me.  In both cases I get the following output:

load-size=0 adler32=1

LOAD-SIZE is too small
 ok
0 >

I can boot via the graphical boot disk chooser (hold down Option key when powering on, then select external FW drive with FreeBSD installed).  These are the drive partitions I see when booted into FreeBSD:

powerpc# gpart show
=>       5  78140155  ad0  APM  (37G)
         5    262203       - free -  (128M)
    262208  77877936    2  !Apple_HFS  (37G)
  78140144        16       - free -  (8.0K)

=>       18  585938926  da0  APM  (279G)
         18       1600    1  !Apple_Bootstrap  (800K)
       1618    2097152    2  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
    2098770   12582912    3  freebsd-swap  (6.0G)
   14681682   33554432    4  freebsd-ufs  (16G)
   48236114    4194304    5  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
   52430418    2097152    6  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
   54527570   16777216    7  freebsd-ufs  (8.0G)
   71304786  514634158    8  freebsd-ufs  (245G)

powerpc# df -h
Filesystem    Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s3    989M    158M    753M    17%    /
devfs         1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/da0s9    238G    155M    219G     0%    /usr
/dev/da0s6    1.9G     50M    1.7G     3%    /usr/obj
/dev/da0s8    7.7G    520M    6.6G     7%    /usr/ports
/dev/da0s7    989M    583M    327M    64%    /usr/src
/dev/da0s5     15G     98M     14G     1%    /var


The ad0 drive is the internal drive, on which Mac OS X is installed.  The external FW drive is da0.  The FreeBSD root partition is on partition 2 in the output above.

Do the OpenFirmware partition numbers match the corresponding ones in the gpart output, or are they one less?  (Or, do they match the slice numbers, which appear to be one greater?)

FWIW, when I boot from the graphical chooser, the "Boot volume" is printed during boot as /pci at f4000000/firewire at e/node at 0010b9f700fc75e4/sbp-2 at c000/disk at 0:3

Any clues as to why booting from the OpenFirmware prompt is not working?

Cheers,

Paul.