On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Tld wrote:

> I have tried rebuilding 1.6 release for i386 from the soruces present on
> the FTP.
> I have cpuflags installed, and the parameters added to compilation are "-O2
> -march=pentiumpro".

Where are you putting that? If you set COPTS='-march=pentiumpro' or
COPTS='-march=686', you don't need "-O2", as COPTS is only added to
the default CFLAGS. On the other hand, if you are overriding CFLAGS,
a lot of things won't work.

> I also had to comment out the building of rescue-small floppy since the
> built file was too big. But that's not the point.
>
> The point is that, once the build command completed
> (FYI "./build.sh -D /usr/tmp/destdir -R /usr/tmp/release -T
> /usr/src/tools/obj/tools.NetBSD-1.6-i386")
> the base.tgz does /not/ contain a working base system. Every command I
> tried residing in /usr/{,s}bin dies with a core dump.
> I suspect libc or some other core library did not take that nicely.
>
> I have repeated the sequence a number of times (more than 3), no visible
> errors or stops happened.

It makes no sense, IMHO, to customize the floppies. You're likely to
get some noticable improvmement by running a custom kernel with all
but `options I686_CPU' commented out, as the multi-cpu switches add
overhead to some system calls. While you're in there, you may as well
add `makeoptions COPTS="-O2 -march=i686"' and `options DUMMY_NOPS'.

Building the whole system with "-march=686" isn't commonly done, as
it's not expected to make much difference, so it may or may not work.
In other words, it's "not supported". I expect it should work, though,
as long as you're not overriding CFLAGS, and as long as you indeed
have a 686. Just for grins, I built the whole base system (except for
the floppies) and X with "-march=k6" (for my K6-2), and it works fine.

Frederick