support installing FreeBSD on PowerPC G5

[Mark Millard]

You likely can hold down the C key to automatically try booting from the CD instead of using Cmd-Option-O-F and "boot cd:,\boot\loader cd:0". When it allows the boot to start it can avoid other things from interfering.

But specifically for "FreeBSD-10.0-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20140528-r266807-disc1.iso (md5 validated) and burned it to a CD" I reported to this list back on 2014-Jun-01:

> For a C-key style boot it hangs shortly after displaying
> 
> loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
> 
> and stops while displaying "/" from its progress indicator. The fans then gradually spin up.
> 
> Trying the available PowerMac7,11 gets the same sort of results so I'll not repeat the information.

This is before it puts out the line about loading that lists data= and syms=[...]. If anything else is blocking booting from such CDs then it is a different issue then I'm dealing with in this note. All other forms of booting from that image burned to CD also get this hang (if you get that far in the first place).

All 10.0-??? and 10.1-??? powerpc64 .iso's since then are that way until recently. It may be that the problem started with FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-*.iso images, I'm not sure (do not remember).

The following is known to not hang that way:

FreeBSD-10.1-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20150121-r277483-disc1.iso

and the more recent

FreeBSD-10.1-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20150201-r278028-disc1.iso

likely does not either, but I've not tested that one. You can find such for a time from:

http://ftp1.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/10.1/

This area is updated periodically and older versions are then removed.

The images at

http://ftp1.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES/10.1/FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-*.iso

have the hang problem. It may be that

http://ftp1.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-*.iso

images also have the hang problem.


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