I finally got a chance to fire up the July 13 i386 binary snapshot
this weekend.  My main purpose was to check whether the new scsi
drivers could read my tape drives correctly.  NetBSD-Feb12 and earlier
never got the last few blocks off a tape which made restore a bit iffy
:-)

I re-installed my IDE drive and managed to load the binaries
onto it.  This would have been easier if I could have booted of sd0a,
but the boot loader just kept saying  "sd* not found".  Since it was
the boot blocks on the IDE drive I don't recall how old they are - I
haven't had the disk in the system since Feb...

Anyway, I got it up and running, and the SCSI drivers worked
flawlessly!  Why was I worried?  Because previously the _only_ drivers
that worked 100% were a version Julian did back in August last year
for 386bsd, with the next version I could not even get a kernel to
boot.  NetBSD-Feb12 has been extremely reliable (not a single hang or
panic since I removed the IDE drive in Feb), and I'm very happy with
it, but with the new scsi drivers NetBSD-1.0 is looking even better.

I was very surprised that a ksh binary that had been sitting on the IDE
disk since Feb20, ran happily under NetBSD-1.0.

Given that much code needed source changes to compile/work correctly
after the off_t changes, I assumed that old binaries would almost
certainly not work.  If I am wrong, then I can update to 1.0 asap, as
I can continue to use my BSDi binary version of MHSnet.   

So the question, after updating to NetBSD-1.0, could I expect a
NetBSD-0.9 vinatage BSDi binary to continue to function correctly?
If not, I'll have to wait until BSDi update to 64bit off_t's and a new
version of MHSnet comes out.  MHSnet is the latest ACSnet software
that most *.oz.au machines run, I could switch back to UUCP, but
MHSnet is much more efficient with data transfers being automagically
restarted where they left off etc and 3 multiplexed chanels for
hi,med,low/bulk priority traffic.

Regardless, NetBSD-1.0 is going to be great!

--sjg

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