On Mon, 3 Nov 2025, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> > > 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. > Stan tested my patch to remove 'const' from the font_desc and font_data structs but it did not help. (There goes that theory.) > 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? > I don't know. But I'm sure Stan would be willing to test a patch for you. > > > > 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. > I will try to set up a MacOS guest in QEMU, to see if the hang can be reproduced that way.
