Fri, 9 Feb 2007

3:41 PM - PowerPC

I was asked to build a PowerPC iso just to see it if was working for G4 Macs. I test booted the iso on my iBook G4 800Mhz. The kernel seems to work as long as a usb keyboard is plugged in. There is a freeze around drive detection without it. The mfsroot does not mount correctly. Out of curiosity, I mounted it on /dev/md0 on my i386 box and many files were all listed as 2.1M in size. Very strange. There could be an endian-ness issue present or something might be wrong with the isofs. For some reason, my initial import of FreeBSD did not include src/sys/powerpc/conf/* files either. I added them today.

Even the FreeBSD PowerPC port isn't that far along and I don't want people to think we're going to support this officially. We simply don't have the people to maintain a PPC port. It would be rather interesting though.

Based on personal experience, I'd recommend OpenBSD to anyone wanting to run a BSD on PowerPC hardware.

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