progress and some questions X5000

[Al]

On 12/08/19 21:17, Justin Hibbits wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Aug 2019 15:07:18 +0200
> Al <al at datazap.net> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> After a very long time of trying different things, it is where the
>> serial console does work. It seems that none of the serial-to-usb
>> devices were fast enough to transfer data from the X5000's serial
>> port.
>>
>> Still, I have some issues. The kernel can't seem to find the
>> userland. It stops with DHCP/BOOTP. It looks like it is trying to do
>> a netboot. I have an install of FreeBSD on a thumb drive. My guess is
>> that I need to move the boot loader to the FAT partition. Is this
>> correct?
>>
>> Also, I just did an install to the thumb drive from an X86 FreeBSD
>> machine that I borrowed to compile the powerpc install. Would it be
>> better to have the cdrom installer on the thumb drive?
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Al
> Hi Al,
>
> I'll give a more thorough reply later, but for now I wanted to address
> the kernel config.  The QORIQ64 config is based on MPC85XX config,
> which assumes an always-netboot environment.  To remove this so that
> you always boot locally, add the following to your kernel config:
>
> nooptions BOOTP
> nooptions BOOTP_NFSROOT
>
> Also, we do have the ability to boot from loader, using ubldr.  The
> instructions to do so are on the wiki, at
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/powerpc/UBoot-Install
>
> Basically you want two top-level partitions (The AmigaOne X5000 U-Boot
> doesn't recognize GPT format, only MBR, so you're stuck with that
> format).  One partition is FAT, and should have ubldr and the .dtb
> file.  The other partition is a FreeBSD disklabel partition, where you
> put your full FreeBSD install.  You cannot create it from x86 as an
> actual install.  If you want to create the image from x86, you need to
> use mkimg, and there are scripts around for building FreeBSD disklabel
> images, you can find them online.
>
> - Justin
>
Hi Justin,

Okay, I made some assumptions about how this would work that are totally 
wrong.

To start, I will rebuild the kernel on the X86 system with what you 
specified above.

I have some old power macs, I guess that I could try getting one of them 
running FreeBSD again. I don't know why, but every time I tried to load 
the install CD they would get almost to where I would expect to see the 
installer and then crash. Any ideas on how to get past this?

Also, I had FreeBSD PowerPC running inside of qemu (not sure how hard 
that would be to get going again). I wonder if I could use that to setup 
the thumb drive. None of the code I compiled inside the emulator seems 
to run on the real hardware, so I don't think that is an option.

Thank you for all your help!

Kind Regards,
Al