Troubleshooting netboot on a PowerMac G4 Cube
Tom Lane <[email protected]> Sun, 07 Aug 2022 17:01:35 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.netbsd.ports.macppc |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
For lack of a working CD drive, I've been trying to install NetBSD 9.3 on my ancient Cube using netboot. I seem to have the bootp and tftp stages working, but I can't get it to load the installation kernel from NFS. I spent a fair amount of hair-tearing before realizing that there seems to be a typo in the INSTALL instructions. They recommend (for Open Firmware >= 3) a boot command like boot enet:0,ofwboot.xcf enet:0,/netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz For me, with Open Firmware 4.1.8f5, the "0" after "enet:" has to be left off. I didn't have too much trouble guessing that, because the command is also shown without "0" for older OF versions. But what I did not find out except by accident is that *it's wrong to use a comma in the kernel file specification*. The syntax that works for me is boot enet:,ofwboot.xcf enet:/netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz (and you can't leave out the "/"). Is this specific to my Open Firmware version? It seems like it ought to be mostly a function of ofwboot not OF proper. Anyway, using that syntax, I get plausible-looking messages including a cursor that spins for a plausible amount of time, but then: >> NetBSD/macppc OpenFirmware Boot, Revision 1.13 (Thu Aug 4 15:30:37 UTC 2022) 14050212\ DEFAULT CATCH!, code=300 at %SRR0: 00e006d8 %SRR1: 00083030 I'm encouraged by the fact that it reports the correct decompressed kernel size, so that at least some data is getting transferred correctly. It seems like it's fetching the whole kernel and then messing up at the point of launching the kernel. I get the same results with compressed or decompressed kernels, except that I see "code=900" with a decompressed kernel. I also tried ofwboot.xcf from the 9.2 distribution, and also netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz from the 9.2 distribution, with no changes except for the reported kernel size. So whatever this is, it's not a very new problem. Any suggestions? regards, tom lane