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Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2015 09:56:26 +0000
From: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@FreeBSD.org>
To: Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>
Cc: sparc64@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Trying to cross-build FreeBSD 10 release ISOs for sparc64
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On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 12:40:57PM +0100, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> While the output ISOs are generated, they appear to be invalid (or at
> least OpenBIOS can't find a valid partition on them). Reviewing the
> logs, the entire build process seems to work all the way up to the point
> where the ISOs are generated which looks like this:
> 
> [...]
> gpart: scheme 'VTOC8': Invalid argument
> gpart: No such geom: md0.
> gpart: No such geom: md0.
> 
> Superficially it looks as if gpart can't understand the partitioning
> scheme used for sparc64 ISOs but does anyone else have any ideas as to
> why this isn't working?

I'm trying to test the patch in https://reviews.freebsd.org/D2791, and
today had encountered exactly this problem with "scheme 'VTOC8': Invalid
argument" of gpart(8).

Quick googling had revealed [1] that it might happen due to endianess
being different on i386 (host) and sparc64 (target).  I'll need to have
a closer look at gpart(8) sources to know better about it, but trying
to make sparc64 iso-image on big-endian PowerPC allowed to create VTOC8
scheme and produce bootable images.

./danfe

[1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2013-February/249013.html