11.2 Installer Issues on G5

[Michael Tuexen]

> On 22. Sep 2018, at 16:46, Koakuma via freebsd-ppc <freebsd-ppc at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> Today I tried playing a bit more with the machine and found some curious
> things that might be of interest:
> 
> 1. To the best of my observation, the hang seems to happen only when
>   there's some disk activity (pre-installer booting, partitioning,
>   cheksumming and extracting the files, etc.).
> 2. Booting with set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0 and boot -v as per tingox's
>   suggestion at https://sites.google.com/site/tingox/powermac_g5_freebsd
>   seems to increase the chance that I get into the installer welcome
>   page (the one with the Install/Shell/Live CD menu) successfully,
>   but it doesn't help with the hangs inside the installer itself.
> 3. If I'm being lucky enough to get into the installer welcome page,
>   I can choose "Live CD" and play with the provided shell without any
>   problem... that is until I try to do something that touches the disk.
>   I even tried to run several instances of yes(1) to put some load on
>   the machine, and it runs just fine under the load.
> 4. Running two instances of yes(1) along with the installer seems to get
>   rid of the hangs in the install process. Sadly, the problem is
>   still present in the installed system.
> 5. The same drive (a 1 TB Seagate BarraCuda) works just fine with macOS.
I can confirm that a very unstable G5, which only sometimes booted, runs
perfectly fine with
kern.smp.disabled=1
in /boot/loader.conf

So it seems that there is a problem with SMP support on the PowerMac G5.
(compiled already a kernel on it, now running buildworld...).

Best regards
Michael
> 
> Attached is the /var/run/dmesg.boot of a "Live CD" session.
> 
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On Monday, September 3, 2018 9:56 AM, koa~ <koachan at protonmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> So I tried booting the installer again and for some reason it worked,
>> but the problem seems to exist in the installed system too.
>> At random times it'd just hang while I'm using it and the red #7 LED
>> will light up. There's no error messages or panics that I can see.
> 
> <dmesg.boot>_______________________________________________
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