Installer randomly hangs during Powermac G4 install

[MarquisdeSade]

Hello,

I have a Powermac G4 "Quicksilver" / dual 800 MHz / 1.5G RAM machine
that has a 802.11b/g Wireless PCI card (with a Marvell Libertas 8335
chipset). I currently only have wireless net access, and I can get
that in Linux or FreeBSD only on x86 platforms using ndiswrapper (or
equivalent). Thanks to the great folks at OpenBSD, there's a
reverse-engineered 'malo(4)' driver for this chipset that works on any
platform including ppc.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=malo

So, I did manage to get the card up and working in OpenBSD 4.2 on an
x86 box, but have since replaced the box with the aforementioned
Powermac. The problem now is that I am not able to complete the
installation of OpenBSD due to various "hangs" at different points
during the install. I have tried using both install42.iso and
install43.iso. By "hang", i mean that the installer (and the machine)
simply stops responding at arbitrary points during the install, and I
can't do anything save a hard reboot. The points at which the hangs
are happening roughly in order of occurrence:

- When drives are being formatted after exiting the label editor
- When the sets are being retrieved from the CD (specifically while
retrieving base42)
- When I go into the shell and fsck a disk that had a bad superblock
(which happened because I had to hard-reboot)

The obvious problems I can think of:
- The disk is bad: Actually, it's fine. It's a 120G western digital
disk that has been formatted (and I just reformatted / refscked it
using the Debian Linux Installer to make sure). The entire disk is for
OpenBSD, and I've tried with both MBR and HFS partition tables to no
avail.
- The installation media or iso is bad: Again, don't think so. The
md5s match, I tried with both install42.iso and install43.iso (from
snapshots), and with two different CD-Rs.

I've never had a crash during a Linux install (I've done it 4 or 5
times) on this machine. I am also unable to try installing OpenBSD
using cd42.iso as I need the full system first before I can install
malo(4) and get the wireless card up.

Any suggestions for getting more debugging output or making the
install go to completion are appreciated (I've been trying to get this
working for quite a while).

thank you,
marq

[leon zadorin]

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Marq <railrulez@...> wrote:

>  So, I did manage to get the card up and working in OpenBSD 4.2 on an
>  x86 box, but have since replaced the box with the aforementioned
>  Powermac.
...
>  I've never had a crash during a Linux install (I've done it 4 or 5
>  times) on this machine.

with the pci card plugged in?

[MarquisdeSade]

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 5:34 PM, leon zadorin <leonleon77@...> wrote:
> >  I've never had a crash during a Linux install (I've done it 4 or 5
>  >  times) on this machine.
>
>  with the pci card plugged in?

Yes, the OpenBSD install on the mac has failed with and without the
card. Perhaps I shouldn't have brought the card aspect in; IMHO, I
don't think the card has anything to do with it; it's usually when I
play around with disklabel or during formatting that it hangs.

I really want to get this working, so I've attached some output  from
the install program (copied from the screen :P), once when trying a
HFS partition table, and once when using an MBR partition table. I
also got a couple of panics today, which I list below as well.
Hopefully someone can point out what I might be doing wrong. I could
attach the dmesg if these logs do not help... it's just a little hard
to get off the machine without network or free USB ports, but I can
figure something out. From a cursory inspection of the dmesg, I do not
see any errors, and the aforementioned PCI card vendor name/chipset
seems to be detected just fine.

What bothers me is that the machine seems to hang not at any specific
point during the install, which makes me wonder whether the RAM or
something more vital has gone bad. I plan to try next with another
working hard disk to completely ensure that it's not the disk's fault.

As always, thanks in advance.
marq

 --------- Attempt 1: Using HFS partition table --------

 Use HFS or MBR partition table? [HFS]
 ...

 Edit /dev/wd0c -
 Command (? for help): p

 Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/wd0c'
 #:                type name        length   base     (size)
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple           63 @ 1
 2:     Apple_Bootstrap untitled      1954 @ 64
 3:             OpenBSD OpenBSD  234439630 @ 2018    (111.8G)

 Device block size-512, Number of Blocks=234441648 (111.8G)
 DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

 Command (? for help): q
 # Inside MBR partition 3: type A6 start 3024size 234438624
 Treating sectors 3024-234441648 as the OpenBSD portion of the disk.
 You can use the 'b' command to change this.

 Initial label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
 > p g
 device: /dev/rwd0c
 type: ESDI
 disk: ESDI/IDE disk
 label: WDC WD1200BB-00C
 bytes/sector: 512
 sectors/track: 63
 tracks/cylinder: 16
 sectors/cylinder: 1008
 cylinders: 232581
 total bytes: 111.8G
 free bytes: 94.8G
 rpm: 3600

 16 partitions:
 #                  size       offset    fstype [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:               5.0G         0.0G    4.2BSD   2048 16384     1
  b:               2.0G         5.0G      swap
  c:             111.8G         0.0G    unused      0     0
  d:              10.0G         7.0G    4.2BSD   2048 16384     1
  i:               0.0G         0.0G     MSDOS

 > n a
 mount point: [none] /
 > n d
 mount point: [none]

 ** Hangs at this point **

 ------ Attempt 2: Using MBR Partition table ------

 Use HFS or MBR partition table? [MBR]
 Use *all* of wd0 for OpenBSD? [no] yes
 Creating Master Boot Record (MBR)...done.
 /dev/rwd0i: 2008 sectors in 251 FAT12clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)
 bps=512 spc=8 res=1 nft=2 rde=512 sec=2048 mid=0xf8 spf=1 spt =63 hds=16 hid=1

 You *MUST* setup the OpenBSD disklabel to include the MSDOS-formatted boot
 partition as the 'i' partition ... [snip] ... OpenBSD cannot be installed.

 # Inside MBR partition 3: type A6 start 3024 size 234438624
 Treating sectors 3024-234441648 as the OpenBSD portion of the disk.
 You can use the 'b' command to change this.

 Initial label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
 > p g
 device: /dev/rwd0c
 type: ESDI
 disk: ESDI/IDE disk
 label: WDC WD1200BB-00C
 bytes/sector: 512
 sectors/track: 63
 tracks/cylinder: 16
 sectors/cylinder: 1008
 cylinders: 232581
 total bytes: 111.8G
 free bytes: 111.8G
 rpm: 3600

16 partitions:
 #                  size       offset    fstype [fsize bsize   cpg]
 c:             111.8G         0.0G    unused      0     0
 i:               0.0G         0.0G     MSDOS
>

** I add partitions till it says **

#                  size       offset    fstype [fsize bsize   cpg]
 a:               5.0G         0.0G    4.2BSD   2048 16384     1  # /
 b:               2.0G         5.0G      swap
 c:             111.8G         0.0G    unused      0     0
 d:              10.0G         7.0G    4.2BSD   2048 16384     1  # /usr
 i:               0.0G         0.0G     MSDOS

***

I then quit, say "done" for everything else, and the installer
eventually hangs while it's formatting one partition or the other. I
even tried another variation of the MBR-based install by hand-creating
an MSDOS 'i' partition like so:

http://archive.netbsd.se/?ml=openbsd-ppc&a=2007-05&m=4019081

but that does not seem to change matters either (still hangs somewhere).

I did get a couple of panics. One was right after I hand-created the
MSDOS 'i' partition for
the first time and went on to formatting the disks; the panic was
something like: "panic: amap_lookups: offset out of range", but I
unfortunately could not write the whole thing down. The other panic I
got was much earlier during the install program (but after I had
hard-rebooted it a number of times). This is the log if it helps.

 ----- Panic log 1 -----

 uhub0: port 1, set config at addr 2 failed
 uhub0: device problem, disabling port 1
 uhub1: port 1, set config at addr 2 failed
 uhub1: device problem, disabling port 1
 bootpath: /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-3@20000/disk@0:/4.3/macppc/bsd.rd
 WARNING: clock gained 2 days -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
 kern dsi on addr a5cab01b iar 2eabfc
 panic: trap type 300 at 2eabfc (openpic_do_pending_int+0x248) lr 2eb004
 Stopped at   Debugger+0x10:    lwz r0,20(r1)