Re: Installing FreeBSD onto XServe G5 cluster node

hi!

Sorry, I'm just getting around to cleaning this up!

Do you have a full boot log? I"ve been debugging why -15 / -16 images
didn't boot (I found out we were building trash images!)
so I'm hoping to be able to boot snapshots again soon.

I Saw this on a 14 and 13 install. It looks like it was waiting for
USB to finish its thing. I had to leave my G5 tower for 5 minutes
for it to eventually timeout.

If you can provide a serial log or screen snapshot or something during
boot - especially if you see busdma alignment allocation
errors like I was seeing! - then we can dig into it further and fix things.

Thanks!


-a

On Thu, 18 Dec 2025 at 23:29, Philip Plane <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I have a XServe G5 cluster node that I'm trying to get FreeBSD installed on.
>
> The cluster node has no CD/DVD, so I'm trying to install over ethernet.
>
> I followed the instructions at
> https://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/install.html, but had no joy. The
> loader started OK but it never found a kernel to load.
>
> I downloaded FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-disc1.iso and
> unpacked that onto my NFS partition, copied the loader to tftpboot and
> got as far as getting a kernel loaded, but it stops at "Root mount
> waiting for: CAM". I'm guessing that means it doesn't like the random
> sata disk that's probably got NTFS partitions or suchlike.
>
> I tried 'boot -s' as per grehan, but never get the 'mountroot' prompt.
> I tried 'boot -a' to select a different boot device but no joy.
>
> Does the supplied kernel support root on NFS?
>
> --
> Phil Plane
>