A few glitches with 10.3-RELEASE on an iBook G4

[Alexander Klein]

Hello,

the other day I decided to resurrect my old iBook G4 using FreeBSD just to 
see how far I'd get in setting up an evironment without X or whatever.

Since the hardware is pretty old, I really wasn't expecting everything to 
work right out of the box with a modern system, but generally most things 
work pretty well. There are a few points, however, where I simply got 
stuck, and maybe someone on the list has a few hints for me:


1. Keyboard:

The keymaps I could choose during install weren't all that useful, but I 
modified an existing one to suit my needs for the time being. However, 
there are still a few quirks left:

The machine has a German keyboard, and it seems that both, the ^/°-key in 
the top left corner, as well as the fn-key in the bottom left corner get 
mapped to scancode 0, which results in some unwelcome duplicated features 
for fn, such as generating additional carets when switching virtual 
consoles with fn+ctrl+alt+<Fn>


2. Screen:

I can't seem to do anything useful with vidcontrol when it comes to 
switching video modes. First of all, vidcontrol -i mode only provides me 
with the following:

     mode#     flags   type    size       font      window      linear buffer
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0 (0x000) 0x00000000 T 0x0             0x1099121152 0xffffd948 1074888k -9k 0xffffd900 1073243k
   1 (0x001) 0x00000000 T 0x0             0x1099121152 0xffffd948 1074888k -9k 0xffffd900 1073243k

... and so on for another few hundred lines.

This may be related to the video card not being detected properly. I'm 
pretty sure it's ATI, but look what sysctl says with respect to the 
backlight:

dev.backlight.0.level: 0
dev.backlight.0.%parent: vgapci0
dev.backlight.0.%pnpinfo: 
dev.backlight.0.%location: 
dev.backlight.0.%driver: backlight
dev.backlight.0.%desc: PowerBook backlight for nVidia graphics
dev.backlight.%parent:

Needless to say that changing the backlight-level doesn't do a thing, and 
vidcontrol -c blink as well as vidcontrol -t 10 don't do anything useful, 
either.


3. Sound:

While a sound device is detected, and the startup sound works just fine, 
FreeBSD has yet to produce a single beep; here's /dev/soundstat:

Installed devices:
pcm0: <Apple I2S Audio Controller> (play) default

And this is what sysctl knows about sound:

device	snd_ai2s
device	snd_davbus
device	snd_uaudio
hw.snd.default_auto: 1
hw.snd.version: 2009061500/powerpc
hw.snd.default_unit: 0
hw.snd.maxautovchans: 16
hw.snd.verbose: 0
hw.snd.vpc_mixer_bypass: 1
hw.snd.feeder_rate_presets: 100:8:0.85 100:36:0.92 100:164:0.97
hw.snd.feeder_rate_polyphase_max: 183040
hw.snd.feeder_rate_min: 1
hw.snd.feeder_rate_max: 2016000
hw.snd.feeder_rate_round: 25
hw.snd.feeder_rate_quality: 1
hw.snd.feeder_eq_presets: PEQ:16000,0.2500,62,0.2500:-9,9,1.0:44100,48000,88200,96000,176400,192000
hw.snd.feeder_eq_exact_rate: 0
hw.snd.compat_linux_mmap: 0
hw.snd.basename_clone: 1
hw.snd.report_soft_formats: 1
hw.snd.report_soft_matrix: 1
hw.snd.latency: 5
hw.snd.latency_profile: 1
hw.snd.vpc_autoreset: 1
hw.snd.vpc_0db: 45
hw.snd.vpc_reset: 0

However, there's no /dev/dsp


4. CPU:

The machine ought to be running at 800MHz, but it seems to come up with 
some kind of frequency throttling according to dmesg:

cpu0: Motorola PowerPC 7455 revision 3.3, 614.62 MHz
cpu0: Features 9c000000<PPC32,ALTIVEC,FPU,MMU>
cpu0: HID0 8450c0bc<EMCP,TBEN,NAP,DPM,ICE,DCE,SGE,BTIC,LRSTK,FOLD,BHT>
cpulist0: <Open Firmware CPU Group> on ofwbus0
cpu0: <Open Firmware CPU> on cpulist0

Anything related to cpufreq is missing from sysctl -a output.


Are those bugs, or am I doing something wrong?

I'll be grateful for any hints.

Best regards,

 	Alexander