> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:33:48 -0500 > From: Justin H Haynes <jus...@justinhaynes.com> > > I am running OpenBSD 5.0 on a Powermac G4 (Digital Audio) with an unmodified > GENERIC kernel. It has run just fine for days at a time with no obvious > problems of any kind until i tried to add new 32-bit PCI SATA cards to it. > When i add the SATA card to one of the slots and power the machine on, > I hear the power come on, and see the screen become active but black. > openfirmware does not display at all and it only stays indefinately in > this state until I power it off. > > When i remove the card it works just fine. I have three of these cards which > I have purchased new from newegg and I have tried all three one at a time > in each of the four PCI slots. > > I apologize in advance as my question is probably hardware related, and > not strictly speaking OpenBSD related; but after searching for my answers I > have been unable to find them so far. I hope the list can help to point me in > the right direction so I can get on with the task of building out my OpenBSD > NAS. > > My question is, can I reaonsably expect this card which i believe to be > supported by OpenBSD to work with this Powermac G4? If not, why; and if so > how can i troubleshoot?
Sorry, no, there is no guarantee that this will work. In any machine, the firmware gets to have a go at doing some minimal configuration of the hardware. If there are bugs in the firmware, or the hardware deviates from the relevant standards too much, this may fail. As OpenBSD developers we've never been impressed by the quality of Apple's OpenFirmware implementation. The Sun implementation (on sparc/sparc64) is much better. But even there you may run into issues. Heck I've even seen this happen on i386/amd64 machines. The only suggestion I have is to try exchanging the card for a different model.
