Re: Current hangs at boot

[Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>]

On 15-May-2008 Jochen Kunz wrote:
>> Well now I'm completly confused.  The 170 booted first try all the
>> way to single user.
> ETOMUCHMEM
> 
> The machine at the colocation has 1 GB RAM, my machine has 2 GB RAM.
> After removing 1 GB my machine boots happily multiuser from the local
> disk. I am going to pester it with some large compile jobs soon.
> 
> I can throw an other gig of bytes into the machine at the colo if you
> wane debug this.

Yes, definately.  My test machine (the 270) has 2GB of ram, and works fine. 
It's very odd that the 170 would have issues.  More than 2GB might be a bigger
issue though, I've never tested that, but I would assume there might be some
problems.

I assume it would be possible to make a machine with 3 or maybe even
4 GB of ram work.  It might take some fiddlery though.  Any more than that is
not possible for 32bit ppc. (as far as I know at least, maybe it is for certain
procs, but its unlikely that the 64 bit procs have largemem instructions at
all, whereas some of the 75xx series procs do.

> An other strange thing: ofwboot hung when it tried to load /netbsd64.
> (There was only /netbsd.) When I made a link from netbsd to
> netbsd.ofppc64 it worked.

That is rather odd.  I usually use the different names to keep my test images
separate, or to put one in with a higher boot priority than another one as a
test, so it's fairly well exercized.

> And I messed up the firmware of my -150. It drops into the OFW prompt
> after power on without displaying the usual IBM banner. If I enter a
> command like "printenv" or "set-defaults" it hangs. "dev" and "ls"
> work. When I try to boot it hangs after loading ofwboot. Strange. I
> removed the NVRAM battery and will let it rest for a day or so. Maybe
> the NVRAM is hossed and this will clear it.

Did you upgrade it?  One thing I noticed, is that if the load-base and other
similar settings get wiped in any way, the machine becomes a giant brick until
you reset them to what they should be.  Some firmware upgrades have a tendency
to set these values to 0.

> Nevertheless: Thanks for all your work. It is really nice to see all
> this black hardware coming to a usefull live. :-)

No problem.  I'm glad to see them working finally, and glad to see people using
them.  I hope that more people will try them out, and help out with the other
support issues on them.

A quick list of things that these machines still need, in no particular order:

Envsys support for the rtas-based environmental sensors. (easy)
Fix support for pci1 on the 170/270 (easy/medium)
Audio support (no idea, audio is magic to me)
Floppy support (easy probably)
ofctl working (medium)

---
Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
Genecys: Open Source 3D MMORPG: http://www.genecys.org/