Re: PowerMac G5 7,2 root & swap on SATA

[Martin Pieuchot]

Hello Ian,

On 01/11/14(Sat) 10:31, Ian Allison wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I have a PowerMac7,2 Dual PPC970 which I attempting to put OpenBSD on. A
> post from last month
> (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ppc&m=141215377210183&w=2) indicated that
> they were having trouble with the root and swap partitions using the MP
> kernel, but that the SP kernel was working fine for them. I get stuck at
> the same point with both the MP and SP kernels, the final line I see
> during a boot is
>
> root on wd0a (0dd4441153447d67.a) swap on wd0b dump on wd0b
>
> or occasionally
>
> drm: initializing kernel modesetting (R350 0x1002:0x4E48 0x1002:0x4E48)
>
> Then the system just hangs, eventually it spins up the fans and I power
> it off.
>
> I see similar behavior with SP and MP on both 5.5 and 5.6. bsd.rd works
> fine; I can complete the partitioning and labeling of the disk, install
> the sets and boot into bsd.rd and mount / (or any other partition). The
> problem only seems to happen when trying to boot the system with the SP
> or MP kernels.
>
>
> My guess was that this is related to the last bullet point under
> "Unsupported Hardware" which says that SATA "does not work on some
> PowerMac G5 and Xserve G5 systems". My wd0 is indeed SATA but I wanted
> to confirm that the problem I am having is a known issue.
>
> I am currently trying to extract a dmesg from the bsd.rd but I'm not
> having much luck.

There's a problem related to radeondrm(4) on such machines. If you
don't need X, you can disable it and the kernel will fall back to
vgafb(4) like in the RAMDISK.

[Ian Allison]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 02:12:41PM +0100, Martin Pieuchot wrote:
> On 01/11/14(Sat) 10:31, Ian Allison wrote:
> > the same point with both the MP and SP kernels, the final line I see
> > during a boot is
> >
> > root on wd0a (0dd4441153447d67.a) swap on wd0b dump on wd0b
> >
> > or occasionally
> >
> > drm: initializing kernel modesetting (R350 0x1002:0x4E48 0x1002:0x4E48)
>

> There's a problem related to radeondrm(4) on such machines. If you
> don't need X, you can disable it and the kernel will fall back to
> vgafb(4) like in the RAMDISK.

Thanks Martin, that worked! Out of interest I now see exactly the same
behavior as the post I referenced before
(http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ppc&m=141215377210183&w=2). MP doesn't get
past mounting root, but SP works just fine. I'll take your advice from
that post and stick to SP for the moment.

Thanks,
Ian.