recent problems with PowerMac G5 64 bit USB

[Tom Pusateri]

I dusted off a PowerMac dual CPU G5 the other day to do some Big Endian Rust debugging. I first tried a Lubuntu 16.04 install image but after installing, I couldn’t get it to boot. yaboot would run and give me a menu to choose linux but when I selected it, it just returned to the mac boot menu. I think they got the open firmware boot command wrong but I can’t figure out what they are calling since it goes by so fast. 

So then I tried various version of FreeBSD with lots of issues:

Version			arch		status
12.0RC3			powerpc64	USB errors prevented keyboard from working so couldn’t configure it
11.2			powerpc64	kernel panic on boot
11.2stable20181203	powerpc64	kernel panic on boot
11.1			powerpc64	kernel panic on boot
11.0			powerpc64	installed ok but portsnap couldn’t fetch/extract ports

11.2			powerpc		booted and installed ok. No pkgs. portsnap fetch/extract ok

So, I’m sure there’s no reason to open bugs on much of this but it does seem odd that 11.2 release images don’t boot and 11.2 stable images don’t boot.

I’m happy to just use 12.0 and so I’m planning on just opening up a bug report on the USB issues there.

Anyone else seeing this on 64-bit?

Thanks,
Tom