On Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:38:15 +0800 Sergey Fedorov <vital....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings, > I am new to OpenBSD, but I am maintaining a number of ports in Macports for > PowerPC. I might try Macports, on my last macppc with a Mac OS install; but it dual-boots OpenBSD, and my other macppcs just run OpenBSD. > There is one immediate issue however which makes usage of OpenBSD far less > efficient than it could have been: lack of FireWire support. > > Could someone help with this? > > FreeBSD supports FireWire, and I think macOS drivers for FireWire are > open-source, FWIW. Maybe those could be ported? One might study FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, or Mac OS to learn how they did FireWire. I don't know whether to port their drivers to OpenBSD or write a new driver for OpenBSD. I'm not ready to try FireWire; it's too big of a project. I tried to add suspend-resume to OpenBSD/macppc, but didn't finish it. > 1. This is the fastest interface on PowerPC Macs, and FW800 is actually > pretty fast, it is comfortable to use, and can be used with RAID. USB2 is fast enough for a network adapter (wi-fi or wired Ethernet). Some Mac models have USB1, which is too slow. If I have a USB1 model and its built-in Ethernet fails, my next best option would be internet via FireWire to another Mac; but I can't do that, because I have no FireWire driver. > 2. It has unique features unavailable with other interfaces: target mode, > also booting on Macs with no support for USB booting. Target mode (hold 't' at boot) turns a PowerPC Mac into a FireWire drive, but I haven't tried it. I need to find a FireWire cable. My macppcs can't boot from my USB cd drive. They can boot from a USB stick drive, but only sometimes. The Open Firmware command might be boot ud:,ofwboot boot usb0/disk:,ofwboot boot usb1/disk:,ofwboot I use commands like "dev usb0 ls" to look for a disk. Sometimes, the disk doesn't show up, so I can't boot. If the Mac has a slot-loading cd drive, I won't use it. The cd would get stuck in the slot. (Tray-loading drives are good.) If I don't use a cd, I can install from USB or netboot. To netboot (boot enet:,ofwboot), I need another OpenBSD computer with a spare Ethernet port to serve nat + dns + dhcp + tftp + nfs. I plug an Ethernet wire from the Mac to the server. This is difficult to set up, but better than slow USB1. --gkoehler
