10.3 on a PPC G5

C

cyrano

I've just installed FreeBSD 10.3 on an Apple G5 (11,2 A1117/A1177 Late 2005 - M9590LL/A Dual core 2 GHz), using the "easy" install with guided partitioning and that went very smooth. Thanks to the devs for this port!

I have a couple of minor issues, however.

When I shut the computer off, with shutdown -r now, it doesn't shutdown, but it restarts. Not really a showstopper, as I let it boot into OSX and shut down from there. I'm just wondering if anyone here has an idea as to why.

I've used the Apple Partition Map disk format, as others seemed not permitted for a PPC install. I assume this is an Apple format. If I reboot into OSX (Tiger, 10.4.11) however, OSX tells me the disk is unreadable and offers to format. Again, not a biggie, as I can tell OSX to ignore the disk. Is this what's supposed to happen? Or did I make a mistake somewhere?
 
This is because shutdown [B]-r[/B] now is exactly the command to reboot. :eek:
To power off you should use shutdown [B]-p[/B] now as especificated on shutdown() man page.

About the disk problem I can not help, I know nothing about Apple hardware.
 
cyrano said:
When I shut the computer off, with shutdown -r now, it doesn't shutdown, but it restarts. Not really a showstopper, as I let it boot into OSX and shut down from there. I'm just wondering if anyone here has an idea as to why.
Click to expand...

have a look at the options for shutdown(), -r is for reboot... try -h or -p

cyrano said:
I've used the Apple Partition Map disk format, as others seemed not permitted for a PPC install. I assume this is an Apple format. If I reboot into OSX (Tiger, 10.4.11) however, OSX tells me the disk is unreadable and offers to format. Again, not a biggie, as I can tell OSX to ignore the disk. Is this what's supposed to happen? Or did I make a mistake somewhere?
Click to expand...

APT is required for PPC macs because the old mac firmware can't boot from GPT.

OS X doesn't support UFS and old OS X versions don't support ZFS so you will just have to keep dismissing it... I get the same issue when I occasionally boot into OS X.
 
Thanks guys.

Well, one brain fart on my part and one problem confirmed. Any documentation on APT anywhere?

I've tried searching on the freebsd.org domain and came up with very little.
 
lebarondemerde said:
shutdown -h now, or Halt, is for old hardware (before ACPI) when there was a need to halt the system (aka "it's ok to power off now") before powering it off.
Click to expand...

I did wonder, I guess I know how buggy the ACPI is when I have to use -h then.

cyrano said:
Thanks guys.

Well, one brain fart on my part and one problem confirmed. Any documentation on APT anywhere?

I've tried searching on the freebsd.org domain and came up with very little.
Click to expand...

What are you trying to find out specifically? APT shouldn't affect much, it's just a partition map. As long as you can boot and partition as you like.
 
The name "Apple partition map" suggested to me it should be readable by OSX.

And I was planning to move some data from one disk (with FreeBSD) to the other (with OSX), also to image the disk, as backup.

Seems I'll have to use an intermediate FAT partition to move data, as FreeBSD can't read HFS+ and OSX can't read APT. But that's not a solution for disk imaging.

I'd just like to know the reason why this is hard/impossible.
 
You're confusing partitioning with the actual filesystems used. OS X certainly understands APT because it is its native partitioning scheme on PPC but if the filesystem used on a partition (such as UFS in this case) is not supported by OS X then it won't recognize it and offers you to initialize the filesystem as you have seen.
 
As kpa said... just so it's clear:

APT is from Apple and used by OS X on PPC machines. Other OS that need to boot on Apple PPC machines must also use APT because boot ROMs are only able to boot of certain partition maps (in the case of Apple PPC firmware they can only boot from APT, not GPT or MBR).

The partition map can host any file system, that doesn't automatically mean that OS X can read any file system though.

FreeBSD can boot from UFS or ZFS, for non boot it can also use FAT of course, NTFS and HFS might possible with ports.

OS X can only boot from HFS, for non boot it can use FAT, and with some third party modules it can do UFS, EXT, NTFS etc.
 
Thanks, Tom.

So the file system is UFS! Now we're getting somewhere...

Tiger's Disk utility correctly identifies the partitions as "FreeBSD-UFS", and mounts them, but the Finder can't "see" them...

I could mount them to /Volumes/bsd/ (I created the directory "bsd" first, of course).

The command used for the mount is sudo mount -t ufs2 /dev/disk1s3 /Volumes/bsd.

I can't access the files yet.

But that's a permission problem, I guess.

There's only a directory "root" and a directory "username" in "bsd".

Is it because of the permissions on the directory bsd in Volumes, or is it because of the permissions on the disk?

Or is the disk not reading right?

Some more experimenting to do :D

I think I could also use fuse to read UFS. I've got that working on OSX 10.9, so I think it could be possible on 10.4 too.
 
You could try to mount the other slices, not sure where the OS slice starts, have a look in disk utility for the largest and then get info to see the /dev/name. However OS X UFS implementation is supposedly a bit different, never bothered to try an mount it myself, might be better to use fuse and be done with it.

Don't know if fuse supports ZFS but if you can get ZFS working it would make for a more reliable volume to share between the systems, less likely to get corrupted.
 
Sorry. Scrap the above...

There's inconsistency how a disk/partition being mounted is reported.

In Disk Utility's gui, it reads "Not mounted" in "Info". The Console reports "Disk mounted", which could mean the disk, but not the partitions.

And that command sudo mount -t ufs2 /dev/disk1s3 /Volumes/bsd did NOT work. I assumed it had worked because it didn't throw any errors. Apparently, adding ufs2 suppresses the errors.

And I've just realised that after a reboot, the disks get numbered differently.

Lemme fix my confusion first :D

I'll report back once my tired brain figures this out.

Thanks for the tip about ZFS, Tom.
 
I'd be weary of trying to mount the system volume of other OS on OS X anyway... OS X sprinkles so much crap on mounted volumes, i'm not just talking about the infamous DS_store, they have grown much more since then, they insist that every volume mounted must contain metadata for all the system services that want to probe that disk because OS X is king... </rant>
 
I would also recommend ZFS for FreeBSD-to-MacOS X shared storage. I heard from a colleague that indeed there is third-party ZFS support under MacOS X and then there is this: https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/OpenZFS_on_OS_X
However, I don't know whether PPC-based Macs still qualify, because a lot of Mac software for PPC was supposedly dropped already.

EDIT: I am also looking forward to any and all updates as I still have a G4 laptop + desktop and G5 desktop (pre-2005 series, though).
 
I'm using Tiger (10.4.11) and I would prefer to stay there, because I need to support some legacy software that doesn't run on Leopard (10.5).

But leopard seems to have read-only ZFS support built in, so I might just install it on another partition and use that to copy data off of the BSD disk.

UFS support on Tiger seems to have to many gotchas to continue trying to enable it. Too much software is Leopard only.

I'll just install Leopard one of these days and re-install FreeBSD on ZFS. No need to be stubborn :D
 
cyrano said:
But leopard seems to have read-only ZFS support built in, so I might just install it on another partition and use that to copy data off of the BSD disk.
Click to expand...

I've got OS X 10.6 on this machine and I get the same unrecognised disk message with ZFS volumes. Maybe you have to explicitly mount it from the command line, I've never wanted to let it touch FreeBSD so haven't tried... just warning you it doesn't appear to work automatically. I guessed that ZFS support was added in the much later systems.
 
After installing Leopard (10.5) I realised there isn't any problem to read UFS2.

Several of the data recovery utilities that will be installed on OSX can read UFS2 and most other file systems. So it's just a question of launching an application and "recovering" the data, or making a disk image. Both basic functions for most data recovery programs.

Besides, If that doesn't work, I can still read the disk in Target mode on another machine with a much more recent version of OSX. It's a little more work, but I've made the first image this way today.

So I'm off, experimenting with FreeBSD and audio and a lot of other stuff.

Just need to find a SCSI card with FreeBSD and OSX support in PCIe form factor.

Thanks for the support folks!
 
tomxor said:
I've got OS X 10.6 on this machine and I get the same unrecognised disk message with ZFS volumes. Maybe you have to explicitly mount it from the command line, I've never wanted to let it touch FreeBSD so haven't tried... just warning you it doesn't appear to work automatically. I guessed that ZFS support was added in the much later systems.
Click to expand...

You need to mount it first in the Terminal. And you need to enable ZFS support with one of these "magic" (read: undocumented) commands.

And ZFS support was already dropped from Snow Leopard, I believe.
 
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