>>>>> Petar Bogdanovic writes:

Petar> David Laight wrote:
>> Can you try booting install-tiny?  or maybe one of the small,
>> ramdisk-free kernels?  (they should get as far as failing to find
>> init)

Petar> David, thanks a million - boot-tiny.fs works!

Petar> I assume that my problem had nothing to do with
Petar> port-i386/26007, so I'll transform my concern into a feedback:

Actually, I think your problem is most probably the same as 26007. The
problem now, I think, is that the work-around Gavan committed in
August works for some people but not for all (which he also noted in
the commit message).

FWIW I also have an (older) VIA cpu machine that exhibits very similar
symptoms; very early in boot the display goes either very weird, or
completely black, or the text size gets very small. In all cases it
hangs hard. Interestingly Gavan's change helped i bit in that it can
now boot from floppy, but the same boot blocks booting from a CD still
hangs... ;-(

I've tried modifying Gavan's changes, inserting more jumps and more
nop:s to try to get this machine to boot from CD too, but nothing I do
seems to help.

What's even more depressing is that NetBSD 1.6.x booted flawlessly on
all these machines... ;-)

Best regards,

        -- Urban