Bug 217375

Summary: installer: powerpc kernel reboots before reaching installer (ibook key lime se)
Product: Base System Reporter: eekee57 <eekee57>
Component: miscAssignee: freebsd-ppc (Nobody) <ppc>
Status: New ---    
Severity: Affects Some People CC: jhibbits, rb, tgl
Priority: ---    
Version: 11.0-RELEASE   
Hardware: powerpc   
OS: Any   
Attachments:
Description Flags
screenshot: fbsd 11 iso boot failure on ibook none

Description eekee57@fastmail.fm 2017-02-26 16:12:50 UTC 
This concerns
FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-powerpc-disc1.iso

I'm trying to boot it on an iBook Key Lime SE; one of the colorful ones but not the earliest variety. It has 1 USB and 1 Firewire ports. CPU is a PPC750. If you need any more info, please tell me how to find it. :) HARDWARE.HTM on the disk itself says it boots on this machine: "All Apple PowerPC machines with built-in USB are supported".

The bootloader appears to work. The kernel starts, I believe; switching the display to white on black and using a larger font. Messages scroll too fast to read on the old flat screen for a few seconds, and then the screen suddenly goes black. Before long, Apple's boot chime is heard. That's all.

This is with the iso on CD-R in the iBook's internal drive. It's not the original drive and is in fact the wrong model, but other live CDs work: Mac OS 9 and a couple of Linux live CDs.
Comment 1 Bob Bishop 2017-02-26 17:06:57 UTC 
How much RAM does this iBook have? The base configuration appears to be 64MB which may not be enough.
Comment 2 Bob Bishop 2017-02-26 17:08:04 UTC 
(In reply to eekee57@fastmail.fm from comment #0)
How much RAM does this iBook have? The base configuration appears to be 64MB which may not be enough.
Comment 3 eekee57@fastmail.fm 2017-02-26 17:20:47 UTC 
(In reply to rb from comment #2)
320MB, 64+256
Comment 4 eekee57@fastmail.fm 2017-02-27 09:38:59 UTC 
Seems I'm not the only one with the issue:

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2017-February/008675.html

At least he managed to get a photo of the screen. I could try, but between my fatigue and coordination issues and the nature of the screen, I don't think I'd succeed.

What I *could* do is get a serial port to replace the internal modem, for serial console. I've been meaning to get one anyway. This of course assumes there's one to fit in an ibook as opposed to an imac, but i expect there is.
Comment 5 Tom Lane 2017-02-27 15:26:25 UTC 
(In reply to eekee57@fastmail.fm from comment #4)
> At least he managed to get a photo of the screen. I could try, but between my fatigue > and coordination issues and the nature of the screen, I don't think I'd succeed.

I've successfully captured such things by taking a video of the screen and then extracting just the last frame before it goes black.  Doesn't require too much coordination, just a phone that can do video.
Comment 6 eekee57@fastmail.fm 2017-03-03 18:11:11 UTC 
Created attachment 180472 [details]
screenshot: fbsd 11 iso boot failure on ibook
Comment 7 eekee57@fastmail.fm 2017-03-03 18:16:01 UTC 
(In reply to Tom Lane from comment #5)
Why didn't I think of that?

Done. The backtrace is identical, if my eyes aren't fooling me. The fault addr is different.
Comment 8 Justin Hibbits freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2020-05-29 01:14:53 UTC 
If this is still a problem, can you try a snapshot CD image?  snapshots have the debugger enabled, so at panic time it should drop to DDB so you can poke around and collect more details (as to what to poke for, I'm not entirely sure, but a backtrace beyond the immediate interrupt would be nice if possible).
Comment 9 Tom Lane 2020-06-01 18:57:48 UTC 
(In reply to Justin Hibbits from comment #8)

While I can't necessarily speak to eekee57's exact problem, I can confirm that
FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT-powerpc-20200528-r361567-disc1.iso
boots successfully (reaches the installer) on both of the PPC Mac machines that I'd previously found 11.0 and 12.0 failed to boot on.
So it's definitely been improved.  I don't have time today for a complete installation, though.