FreeBSD 11 on PowerBook G4

[Mark Millard]

Justin Hibbits jhibbits at freebsd.org wrote on Thu Nov 10 19:31:10 UTC 2016

> Try setting at the loader kern.vty=sc, to use
> syscons instead of it.

The KERNCONF's GENERIC for powerpc and GENERIC64 for powerpc64 do not include syscons: -r265868 replaced "device sc" with "device vt" for GENERIC. As I understand for GENERIC64 such was in part because the PS3 support was incompatible with having both syscons and vt so syscons was dropped when vt was added (-r265871): the same sort of replacement. These changes date back to 2014-May. (SC_OFWFB and SC_DFLT_FONT lines were also removed when vt was added.)

One of the things my personal powerpc64 (PowerMac G5) FreeBSD builds do beyond the hack for allowing reliable 64-bit G5 booting is to disable PS3 and enable/include syscons (sc) in addition to vt. (Nathan W. gave me the hint to do this long ago, to address some large screen handing issues in vt at the time if I remember right: for the large screen I could then switch to sc (syscons) instead.)

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Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net