Re: NetBSD 7.0 i386 panic during boot

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Mon, 12 Oct 2015 08:27:56 +0530
    From:        Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20151012025756.GA5491@odin>

  | What will help me gather the trace in a file? I think there is a notion of
  | dump device, but that's all I know about it. Is there any good document?

If it is (as I believe is the case) failing to boot correctly, there
is no operating system running to write files, no filesystems visible
to write them, or crash dumps, to, nothing available but what appears on
the console.

The traditional way to handle this was to switch to a serial console (using
a com port) - but these days those things are very rare, so that option
is mostly no longer available.

Without that, all that you can get is what you can see on the screen.

kre

ps: it would be interesting to know if there was any rational way to
develop a NetBSD to NetBSD USB protocol that could maybe be used to
replace serial consoles ... requiring just a cable to link 2 NetBSD
systems to each other - I know nothing about USB, but if there's enough
access to the raw bits, it should be possible to make the running
NetBSD identify itself as some kind of new USB device, and have the
booting kernel look for that, and if found, use it as a console device.
Might that be possible?