BTX on USB pen drive

[Vincent Mialon]

Hello 

My name is Vincent Mialon  and I'm in a six months placement at
Gitoyen http://www.gitoyen.net/ (a small opensource-based LIR)

Gitoyen is a Local Internet Registry. The current routing solution is mainly 
based on linux with quagga running ospf and bgp. All routers runs 
linux from USB flash drives but we think that FreeBSD could be mutch better 
with OpenOSPFD and OpenBGPD. My mission at Gitoyen is to be able to route 
about 2Gbps at 190 kilo packets per second using opensource softwares...

I want to use nanobsd to generate optimized FreeBSD-7.0-release images on USB 
pen drive. I generated images with nanobsd. It works on a standard pc with an 
old Celeron 2.4Ghz but on a brand new supermicro X7SBi with a Core 2 Quad it 
doesn't boot. 

The boot selector is shown and I can choose between the two images that 
nanobsd generated. When it times out BTX crash with very fast scrolling 
lines. When I shutdown I can see "BTX Halted" with processor registers 
written on the screen. I tried different ways to bypass this error using grub 
but when the kernel is launched, grub (or the kernel) crashes (even with a 
GENERIC kernel). 

(I updated the motherboard BIOS but no change occured except ACPI fixes.)

The motherboard works perfectly on FreeBSD from a sata drive. Linux 2.6.24 
boots with no problem on a USB flashdrive. 

I tested various options in boot0cfg with no sucess. I also tested the howto 
from 
http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2 
with a 6.3 FreeBSD release which boots on my pc but doesn't boot on my 
supermicro server.

Do you have any idea or pointer that may help me find the way to boot this usb 
drive ? I may file a bug report if you want. 

Best regards

Vincent