On Mon, 3 Nov 2025, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:

quoted

Anyway, I imagine that the problem with your patch was that it relies 
on font data from a different (read only) section, which is 
unavailable for some reason (MMU not fully configured yet?)

So I've asked Stan to test a patch that simply removes the relevant 
'const' keywords. It's not a solution, but might narrow-down the 
search.

Stan tested my patch to remove 'const' from the font_desc and font_data 
structs but it did not help. (There goes that theory.)

I wonder if this is a compiler-flag-ism;  I see 
arch/powerpc/kernel/Makefile has a pile of special flags, and for 
btext.o it has a -fPIC (as well as turning off some other flags). I 
wonder if bodging those in lib/fonts/Makefile for 
lib/fonts/font_sun8x16.c fixes it? But... this is data - there's no code 
is there - are any of those flags relevant for data only?

I don't know. But I'm sure Stan would be willing to test a patch for you.

quoted

The BootX bootloader doesn't work on New World systems, which is 
probably why we don't see this regression on anything newer than a 
Wallstreet.

It's likely that other Old World systems are also affected, if they 
are using BootX. We don't yet know whether the regression also affects 
Old World systems using the iQUIK bootloader instead of BootX.

OK, remember I don't think I've ever tried PPC via MacOS booting, so not 
familiar with it.

I will try to set up a MacOS guest in QEMU, to see if the hang can be 
reproduced that way.