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.