Re: 8.0_BETA on Mac Mini G4 with bad CD drive...

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 12:25:24 +0200, Havard Eidnes wrote:

> Instead, it appears that the Mac Minis can be booted from a USB stick
> (which isn't documented in our release notes).  So once again I pulled
> out "pdisk", created a 20M "Boot" Apple_HFS partition, and used
> hfsutils to put ofwboot.elf, ofwboot.xcf and the install kernel on the
> Boot partition:

Mini's OFW groks mbr/fat.  I don't think I tried it with USB
specifically, but I use with my main hdd.  That makes it possible to
prepare the USB ~anywhere since you won't need hfsutils.


> since 1) I want the entire disk for NetBSD, and 2) I do not want to
> use any non-OpenFirmware or non-NetBSD stuff to aid in the install,
> so I did:
> 
>   Exit into the shell
>   Use pdisk to partition the harddrive:
>   1 Apple_HFS 20MB boot partition (for ofwboot.* files)
>   1 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap partition of 1.3GB
>   1 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root partition with the rest of the disk

Alternatively you can just use MBR for the disk and a FAT partition
for ofwboot.  That makes the ofwboot partition directly mountable.
(Normally you don't care much, but it was a huge time saver when I was
investigating that infamous ofwboot.xcf bug).


>   setenv boot-device hd:\ofwboot.elf netbsd
>   reset-all
>
> and it *should* boot all the way.
[...]
> To get that fixed (um, no, "worked around"), I apparently need to
> break into OFW and do "boot" from there instead.  Help to get that
> last piece dealt with would be much appreciated.

IIRC, if OFW detects that there's no monitor connected to the machine
it will not init the card properly.  To force it, you need to set
boot-command to something like

  ." hello" cr " screen" output boot


Another problem was the radeon driver.  I couldn't get it to work with
the DVI output, so I had to disable it in the kernel config so that
genfb can take over.  IIRC, this is the problem only with DVI, the VGA
is ok.  But if you are not sure which display you are gonna use, it
might make sense to proactively

  no radeonfb*    at pci?

Or we should get macallan a mac mini, not pun intended :)


-uwe