Re: Issues with NetBSD 8.1 macppc

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 06:38:57PM +0000, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> Thanks for the test images. I've had a check around OpenBIOS and it seems that if you
> boot the image via "boot cd:,\ofwboot.xcf" then the resulting bootpath property gets
> set to "/pci@f2000000/mac-io@c/ata-3@21000/cdrom@0:2,\ofwboot.xcf".

Based on Valery's mail, I went back and tested ofwboot.elf as well. That
one works, so there is something different between the way the kernel
interacts with OpenBIOS depending on which variant of the loader is
used.

> However the bootpath that gets displayed in canonicalize_bootpath() is
> "/pci@f2000000/mac-io@c/ata-3@21000/cdrom@0:0/netbsd" where the partition number (2)
> has been replaced with 0 and that's why the firmware fails to open the device. Do you
> know where the part is that parses the OF bootpath property and replaces ofwboot.xcf
> with /netbsd when constructing the bootpath string?

I think it is this logic:
https://anonhg.netbsd.org/src/file/ccc87740ba45/sys/arch/macppc/stand/ofwboot/boot.c#l305

> The other thing I've noticed is your unpatched.iso kernel is called netbsd.macppc
> whereas your patched.iso is called netbsd. And in fact OpenBIOS can load the netbsd
> ELF directly if you like, which makes me wonder if this could be related to the panic?

Different kernel names are an artifact of the creation process, no other
reason. Something is clearly going wrong, it would be nice to finally
find out the real problem to stop it :) I'm also curious about the
allocation errors in the direct boot process.

On the question of loading the kernel directly, I think the only
difference right now is whether it is possible to pass boot flags to the
kernel or not. I don't think the direct load supports that right now.
But that's more a question for the PPC folks.

Joerg