Re: Installboot on Beige G3

[Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost>]

> Just for the sake of completeness, I did get the same result from the
> CF Card over IDE as I did on SCSI, I had to set the ide boot
> configuration in the Openfirmware environment variables to get it to
> work though.

installboot(8) for macppc assumes the whole disk is allocated for
NetBSD/macppc, i.e. offset of the partition a is zero.
installboot(8) also assumes there is no existing Apple Parittion map
and it overwrites the APM to make Openfirmware recognize the primary
bootloader (bootxx) at the top of the NetBSD partition.

On the other hand, OF3 machines requires HFS or FAT partition
to a load bootloader file (ofwboot.xcf etc.) and there are
few OF2 users, so current documentation could be a bit confusing.

We can also load ofwboot.xcf in FAT or HFS partition even on
OF2 machines, but there is no "standard" way to setup such partition..
 https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2024/06/06/msg003128.html

> Whilst the kernel doesn't load correctly with the same errors (FAILED
> TO CLAIM PHYS and DEFAULT CLAIM) I swapped out the kernel on disk with
> the one from the Installer CD, it booted for a second then I think had
> issues that it couldn't find the CD. It went past too fast to be sure
> but the kernel definitely loaded as I got the White text on a black
> background for a second!
> 
> Given this I think I am going to be trying to build the kernel on the
> hardware itself. I think the issue is the kernel is too big to load
> and I am not sure where to go from here apart from this.

I have UMAX Apus2000/200 with IDE and mesh SCSI, but its OpenFirmware
is so buggy and it's a bit difficult to get stable boot.

- booting SCSI CD always fails with "CLAIM failed" at the first time,
  and I have to "reset-all" before retrying boot

- booting IDE doesn't set proper "boot-device" properties
  there is a workaround for such machine:
https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/79e1e9de/sys/arch/macppc/stand/ofwboot/boot.c#L269-L282

FYI, NetBSD/macppc 10.1 dmesg of my Apus2000 is here:
 https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi?do=view&id=8180

If you can get multi-user login: prompt, you can see boot dmesg
in /var/run/dmesg.boot :-)

---
Izumi Tsutsui