Re: Netbooting a blue and white G3

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello,

On Oct 14, 2009, at 11:16 AM, Andy Ruhl wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
> > You will need some way to apply firmware patches ( without the damn  
> > thing
> > won't even look at your disks ) - the easiest way is to boot an OSX  
> > install
> > disk ( anything up to 10.4 should work. The installer will bitch at  
> > some
> > point but we don't care - at that point the patches are in place )
> > Since you have OF before 3 you'll need to use the partition zero  
> > method,
> > otherwise things should Just Work.
>
> When I boot to the firmware, the machine says "Open Firmware 3.1.1". I
> assume this is OK?

Should be. Count yourself lucky it's not some 2.x OF.

> I'm having a hard time trying to get the thing to boot from a disk. I
> put in a new 200 gig disk, then netbooted an install kernel and
> installed onto it. I took all the defaults. I used the entire disk and
> / takes up the whole disk, other than 2048 meg for a swap partition.

Since it's OF3 you may want to put ofwboot.xcf into MacOS X's / and  
have it load the kernel from a NetBSD partition. That's what I do on  
my G4.
The boot command looks like this:
boot hd:ofwboot.xcf ultra1:10/netbsd
This loads the kernel from the 2nd disk, partition number 10 ( OF  
partition numbers are weird, if you create partitions with MacOS X's  
Disk Utility look at the device path it displays, the numbers should  
match OF's ). On your machine the alias for the 2nd disk will probably  
be different.
The partition zero method will not work on OF3.

Finally, older OF doesn't support LBA, so it's limited to 128GB,  
probably less for loading a kernel ( MacOS X sees my 160GB disk as  
128GB for that reason. NetBSD sees the whole thing of course. Newer  
machines don't have this problem. ) You may want to make sure your  
kernel is in the first few gigabytes of your disk, the easiest way to  
do so is to have a smaller root partition.

> Also, another thing that is quite annoying is the font size once the
> kernel loads "wsdisplay0" when I'm netbooting the OS. The font size is
> fine, the same as the firmware size up until then. Once it hits
> "wsdisplay0" in the boot messages, the font size is increased about 10
> times and I get this huge font. I'm trying to figure out how to change
> it with wsconsctl but so far I haven't had much luck.

That's the Sun console font compiled into the kernel, you can replace  
it with something smaller.

have fun
Michael
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)

iQEVAwUBStYBBcpnzkX8Yg2nAQIXqQgAgScU4/uumCXXOkyubuCcPg5V/c49EJTH
qpiqmQsY9pIdqfy1BAYs7a05bTG2FHLpBedDkVebqH2BzNW4T4ExD6uU7DhBZxTp
ta26dLQUvhf283Eiu+cZXIIObsyNUSgG6nUg4CVIT1I5arQFCor8oljzlFxsYNmV
ywBjQDOhh01n7D2OjGixVKT8YIq6U2TWE0yaqthVE80RWy2Ak1NsoXlZRrm1efK3
pFpKQ1uNrBHpYwqE135qcFYYQNISPrAyt4Kqiehl+lwz0EedhbSuzCgaKr0Hmdoz
Cm2WF2xqAZPtVjXg/LzkLbWs93q8AxPYFuFuqyTlht0/f5Jes4nehg==
=14kJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----