Hello My name is Vincent Mialon and I'm in a six months placement at Gitoyen http://www.gitoyen.net/ (a small opensource-based LIR) Gitoyen is a Local Internet Registry. The current routing solution is mainly based on linux with quagga running ospf and bgp. All routers runs linux from USB flash drives but we think that FreeBSD could be mutch better with OpenOSPFD and OpenBGPD. My mission at Gitoyen is to be able to route about 2Gbps at 190 kilo packets per second using opensource softwares... I want to use nanobsd to generate optimized FreeBSD-7.0-release images on USB pen drive. I generated images with nanobsd. It works on a standard pc with an old Celeron 2.4Ghz but on a brand new supermicro X7SBi with a Core 2 Quad it doesn't boot. The boot selector is shown and I can choose between the two images that nanobsd generated. When it times out BTX crash with very fast scrolling lines. When I shutdown I can see "BTX Halted" with processor registers written on the screen. I tried different ways to bypass this error using grub but when the kernel is launched, grub (or the kernel) crashes (even with a GENERIC kernel). (I updated the motherboard BIOS but no change occured except ACPI fixes.) The motherboard works perfectly on FreeBSD from a sata drive. Linux 2.6.24 boots with no problem on a USB flashdrive. I tested various options in boot0cfg with no sucess. I also tested the howto from http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2 with a 6.3 FreeBSD release which boots on my pc but doesn't boot on my supermicro server. Do you have any idea or pointer that may help me find the way to boot this usb drive ? I may file a bug report if you want. Best regards Vincent
On Mar 6, 2008, at 11:42 AM, Vincent Mialon wrote:> I want to use nanobsd to generate optimized FreeBSD-7.0-release > images on USB > pen drive. I generated images with nanobsd. It works on a standard > pc with an > old Celeron 2.4Ghz but on a brand new supermicro X7SBi with a Core 2 > Quad it > doesn't boot. >Take a look at pfSense, a freebsd-based firewall/router with a nice GUI. I believe it can boot from USB stick. It will run as a live CD as well, which seems more secure than USB since you can't corrupt it. It is open source and free of cost. See http://www.pfsense.com/ If you *really* want to roll your own with nanobsd, see if you can make it use grub as the boot loader instead. I hear it has an easier time with some hardware.
On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Vincent Mialon wrote:> I tested various options in boot0cfg with no sucess. I also tested > the howto from > http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-u >sb-stick-episode-2 with a 6.3 FreeBSD release which boots on my pc but > doesn't boot on my supermicro server. > > Do you have any idea or pointer that may help me find the way to boot > this usb drive ? I may file a bug report if you want.I wanted to make a USB flash drive based installer for FreeBSD but unfortunately BTX seems to have issues that make it difficult to do reliably :( Here are 2 patches I tried.. http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_crx.patch They improved things but I still found a number of systems where BTX would spin dumping register info so fast I couldn't read it (or take a photo..). Unfortunately I have no idea how you'd debug this sort of thing, it's too much like DOS programming for me :) FWIW when it did work it was great :) I used FreeSBIE as my base - it has stuff to build USB images in CVS (v2). http://www.freesbie.org/ I don't know if it's possible to use GRUB or something like that instead of BTX.. I have no experience with it, but I would be very interested if it did work (although since GRUB is i386 only and I use amd64 systems that's another hurdle..) -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20080307/80e8dbc5/attachment.pgp
Vincent Mialon wrote:> The boot selector is shown and I can choose between the two images that > nanobsd generated. When it times out BTX crash with very fast scrolling > lines. When I shutdown I can see "BTX Halted" with processor registers > written on the screen. I tried different ways to bypass this error using grub > but when the kernel is launched, grub (or the kernel) crashes (even with a > GENERIC kernel).Hi, It is known that the default boot loader (BTX) can have problems with various configuration that somewhat deviate from what was the standard many years ago when it was written. For example, it sometimes fails for me to boot from hardware RAID arrays (twice so far), etc. In all cases, using sysutils/extipl helped - it's an alternative boot loader and it works for me on both i386 and amd64. Install FreeBSD where you want it as usual, then run extipl on the boot device to install its default setup (if you're installing from a CD media, run the fixit shell, mount and chroot into the newly installed system, install extipl from ports, change sysctl kern.geom.debugflags to 16, run it). I didn't need to tweak any of its advanced settings. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20080307/a1046e26/signature.pgp
> On Sunday 09 March 2008 09:07:03 am Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote: > > On Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:44:50 -0800 > > Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org> wrote: > > > > > Your boot0cfg line to reinstall the boot0 MBR looks fine, but I don't > > > use boot0 myself (I prefer to go right into boot2/loader). > > > > I used 'fdisk -B da0' to install /boot/mbr to the disk for testing. > > When I now boot the disk on the Acer laptop, it just displays one > > register dump followed by "BTX halted". > > You haven't updated boot2 (via bsdlabel -B) which sits in between boot0/mbr > and /boot/loader. >think you can apply the same magic to pxeldr? danny