FreeBSD 7, 8, 9, 10 etc. on 486, Pentium, K6, etc.

Uniballer

Uniballer

I still have some old hardware, some of which I actually have a use for (I guess the rest is just retro-computing). I thought I was version locked on 6.4-STABLE on these old systems because the GENERIC kernel on the installation media would not run on later versions, but I recently realized that this is mainly due to the old motherboards not having an APIC or proper ACPI support. I have found that 9.3-PRERELEASE will run on the old hardware if I build a custom kernel (NOAPIC, NOSMP, NOACPI seems to be the key). Of course, it makes installation a bit of a pain. Is there an easier way than building a system disk by hand with a custom kernel on a working system? Remember that you can't count on booting from USB, or maybe even CD, on these old machines.
 
If they're new enough to have PCI slots, install a network card that can netboot. Then build your custom installer and host it on the server.

Machines with only ISA slots might be able to do it. A lot of those old cards had ROM sockets, but I never had one with an actual ROM. There are iPXE floppy images, too.
 
One of the problems is that the BIOS on old motherboards doesn't understand big disks. Some of the ones I have are limited to about 2GiB, some to around 8.4Gib. So hand building the system disk includes partitioning the disk so that the boot code and all of /boot are within the range that the BIOS can load. The easiest way is to make the root filesystem pretty small (<1 GiB) and have separate filesystems for /tmp, /var, /usr, /home etc. Just like sysinstall used to do it.

I was thinking it might be possible to make memstick with my custom kernel and copy the image onto an IDE disk drive installed in a USB carrier on the build system, then cable the resulting disk directly to the motherboard as a secondary drive. If I could boot from that then I could do an ordinary install pretty easily. Would that be likely to work? I took a shot at it and so far it fails really quickly. How would I build that for an i386 system on an amd64 system?

I assume that I'm doing it wrong because I'm misunderstanding something crucial. Here's what I did that failed:
Code: 
cd /usr/src
make buildworld TARGET=i386
make buildkernel TARGET=i386 KERNCONF=OLDKERN
make installworld TARGET=i386 KERNCONF=OLDKERN DESTDIR=/home/me/release
make installkernel TARGET=i386 KERNCONF=OLDKERN DESTDIR=/home/me/release
# so far, so good
cd release
make memstick TARGET=i386 KERNCONF=OLDKERN DESTDIR=/home/me/release

Here is the whole output:
Code: 
mkdir -p dist
cd /usr/src/release/.. && make TARGET_ARCH=i386 TARGET=i386 distributeworld DISTDIR=/usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist
mkdir -p /tmp/install.aVbEqRe0
progs=$(for prog in [ awk cap_mkdb cat chflags chmod chown  date echo egrep find grep id install install-info  ln lockf make mkdir mtree nmtree mv pwd_mkdb  rm sed sh sysctl test true uname wc zic tzsetup; do  if progpath=`which $prog`; then  echo $progpath;  else  echo "Required tool $prog not found in PATH." >&2;  exit 1;  fi;  done);  libs=$(ldd -f "%o %p\n" -f "%o %p\n" $progs 2>/dev/null | sort -u |  while read line; do  set -- $line;  if [ "$2 $3" != "not found" ]; then  echo $2;  else  echo "Required library $1 not found." >&2;  exit 1;  fi;  done);  cp $libs $progs /tmp/install.aVbEqRe0
cp -R ${PATH_LOCALE:-"/usr/share/locale"} /tmp/install.aVbEqRe0/locale
mkdir /home/me/release//usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist/doc
mkdir: /home/me/release//usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist: No such file or directory
*** [distributeworld] Error code 1 (ignored)
mtree -deU -f /usr/src/etc/mtree/BSD.root.dist  -p /home/me/release//usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist/doc >/dev/null
mtree: /home/me/release//usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist/doc: No such file or directory
*** [distributeworld] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src.
*** [distributeworld] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src.
*** [base.txz] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src/release.

I seem to get very similar results if I try to make release instead of make memstick.
 
I guess I have to leave off the DESTDIR= for the make memstick target. I don't know yet if it's doing what I wanted, but at least it's doing something.
 
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