* Finn Thain ([email protected]) wrote: > > On Sun, 2 Nov 2025, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote: > > > > > So I'm not a PPC person specifically; so lets see if the PPC people have > > any suggestions, but: > > > > a) Do you know if there's any way to recreate the same hang/works > > combination in qemu; I know it has a g3beige model but I don't know how > > to get something similar to your failing combo. > > > > I guess we could probably reproduce this in QEMU if the BootX bootloader > could be made to work there. In theory, 'qemu-system-ppc -M g3beige' might > work. > > > b) Can you get any diagnostics out of the prom on the mac? Like a PC > > or anything to have some idea where it hung? > > > > Well, that's the problem: if you enable the CONFIG_BOOTX_TEXT diagnostics, > the system hangs instead of printing stuff. If you disable the > CONFIG_BOOTX_TEXT diagnostics (in favour of serial diagnostics) the hang > goes away.
Ah, a bug that doesn't like to be seen :-) > Anyway, I imagine that the problem with your patch was that it relies on > font data from a different (read only) section, which is unavailable for > some reason (MMU not fully configured yet?) > > So I've asked Stan to test a patch that simply removes the relevant > 'const' keywords. It's not a solution, but might narrow-down the search. I wonder if this is a compiler-flag-ism; I see arch/powerpc/kernel/Makefile has a pile of special flags, and for btext.o it has a -fPIC (as well as turning off some other flags). I wonder if bodging those in lib/fonts/Makefile for lib/fonts/font_sun8x16.c fixes it? But... this is data - there's no code is there - are any of those flags relevant for data only? > > c) Is this only the Powerbooks that are unhappy - are other Macs OK > > with this - if so, wth is the difference with a powerbook? Is it a > > different debian config or something? > > > > The BootX bootloader doesn't work on New World systems, which is probably > why we don't see this regression on anything newer than a Wallstreet. > > It's likely that other Old World systems are also affected, if they are > using BootX. We don't yet know whether the regression also affects Old > World systems using the iQUIK bootloader instead of BootX. OK, remember I don't think I've ever tried PPC via MacOS booting, so not familiar with it. Dave -- -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code ------- / Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux | Happy \ \ dave @ treblig.org | | In Hex / \ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/
