FreeBSD 10.1 PPC64 on XServe G5 hangs at Openfirmware Loader [USB stick booting a PowerMac G5]

[Mark Millard]

I'm not sure which stage(s) you are after: Produce a usb memstick or just booting it after you have it. Also this is/was for a PowerMac G5 ("quad"), not for a XServe. (I've never had my hands on an XServe.)



A) Producing the memstick...

Given the variety of possibilities for producing the stick, possibilities not limited to using the Powermac/XServer context, I'll just report for that: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/announce.html lists for unix-like contexts something similar to...

sudo dd if=FreeBSD-10.1-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20141207-r275566-memstick.img \
	    of=/dev/<APPROPRIATE-NAME> bs=10240 conv=sync

where you need to figure out the <APPROPRIATE-NAME> based on the context you are working in and you might use a different .img file. (I used Modern Mac OS X to produce mine.) You might not need sudo but I did. You would first need to dismount any existing, already-mounted file systems from that stick (if any). The above puts down everything in the proper formats, including the partitioning: a very low level complete overwrite. Typos in <APPROPRIATE-NAME> can be a disaster: be careful.



B) Booting from the memstick...

Booting into openfirmware (using command-option-O-F) with the updated stick already plugged in the front automatically bound ud: to the stick appropriately. (No other USB sticks plugged in so it was the only USB disk.) The openfirmware command

dir ud:2,\ppc

(I think it was) would list the bootinfo.txt file that I reference below if ud: was bound automatically. (The 2 picks out the slice/partition to find the ppc folder/directory in.)

At the prompt I then used:

boot ud:2,\ppc\bootinfo.txt

===
Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net