FreeBSD 11.3 or 12.x on IBM 9115-505

[Mark Linimon]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 04:04:53PM +0000, Phil Scarr via freebsd-ppc wrote:
> Should either 11.3 or 12.1-RC2 be expected to work on an IBM POWER5+
> system?

11.3 yes, 12.x I am skeptical.

I say this as someone who has run the similar 9133s for several years.
(OTOH now that I have a Talos Blackbird they have been powered down
for > 6 months.)

The problem with 12.x is that there are two regressions:

 - one having to do with emX interrupts crashing the machine
   post-iflib-ization;

 - the other having to do with some kind of regression in
   reading values out of the firmware.

I spent a little time trying to fix the former but got nowhere; I
did not try to fix the latter.  I simply stayed on 11.x.

I have extensive notes around here ... somewhere ... if you are
determined to try to get this machine to work.  IMHO the Power5
machines are finicky beasts and it took a lot of experimenting to
get mine to boot.  (I never did get from-disk booting correct;
FreeBSD does not have a driver for the on-board SCSI driver, and
attempts to use 3rd-party SCSI or SATA cards were pretty miserable.)

As for the CD/DVD, I don't think I ever got them to work.  I don't
remember exactly.  Even at the end I was running everything over
NFS.

At one time, I was building packages for 11.x with one or the other
of these machines; but, those haven't been updated for over a year
now (and, my webserver is down).  So, you would have to build your
own packages (or contribute to funding my electricity bill :-) )
But at the time I don't recall too many 11-specific problems.

The developer focus has shifted to P8/P9 machines, on 12.x but
especially on -CURRENT.

mcl