Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 20:59:52 +0000 From: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com> To: Phil Scarr <phil.scarr@pm.me> Cc: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 11.3 or 12.x on IBM 9115-505 Message-ID: <20191022205951.GA8910@lonesome.com> In-Reply-To: <B3B54E60-55FE-4B32-814C-EB1FDD1E8B9B@pm.me> References: <B3B54E60-55FE-4B32-814C-EB1FDD1E8B9B@pm.me>
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On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 04:04:53PM +0000, Phil Scarr via freebsd-ppc wrote: > Should either 11.3 or 12.1-RC2 be expected to work on an IBM POWER5+ > system? 11.3 yes, 12.x I am skeptical. I say this as someone who has run the similar 9133s for several years. (OTOH now that I have a Talos Blackbird they have been powered down for > 6 months.) The problem with 12.x is that there are two regressions: - one having to do with emX interrupts crashing the machine post-iflib-ization; - the other having to do with some kind of regression in reading values out of the firmware. I spent a little time trying to fix the former but got nowhere; I did not try to fix the latter. I simply stayed on 11.x. I have extensive notes around here ... somewhere ... if you are determined to try to get this machine to work. IMHO the Power5 machines are finicky beasts and it took a lot of experimenting to get mine to boot. (I never did get from-disk booting correct; FreeBSD does not have a driver for the on-board SCSI driver, and attempts to use 3rd-party SCSI or SATA cards were pretty miserable.) As for the CD/DVD, I don't think I ever got them to work. I don't remember exactly. Even at the end I was running everything over NFS. At one time, I was building packages for 11.x with one or the other of these machines; but, those haven't been updated for over a year now (and, my webserver is down). So, you would have to build your own packages (or contribute to funding my electricity bill :-) ) But at the time I don't recall too many 11-specific problems. The developer focus has shifted to P8/P9 machines, on 12.x but especially on -CURRENT. mcl
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