Some problems moving to new hardware with NetBSD-8/i386

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello all, I tried searching on this stuff but didn't find much in
regards to NetBSD.

Unfortunately I'm not a developer, so I can't help to fix this
stuff... But I will help in any way I can.

My old machine died. I bought a cheap motherboard/memory/cpu combo
because in the past I found that buying something a year or 2 old was
a good idea. More stuff would be supported.

It's an MSI H110M Gaming motherboard, Micron 4gig DDR4 memory stick,
and Intel Celeron dual core G3930 Kaby Lake CPU. I haven't used Intel
stuff for a long time, it was AMD for years.

I'm having enough problems trying to upgrade my old i386 server
machine such that I'm hoping someone can tell me "Just by this
motherboard/memory/cpu" or even some pre-built machine. I want to
upgrade to amd64 (x86_64) at some point, and I will do that if it will
solve some of these problems.

Problems:

1. Memory is not detected as 4GB:

NetBSD 8.0_BETA (GENERIC.201711131530Z)
total memory = 2209 MB
avail memory = 2153 MB

The motherboard's BIOS reports 4096 MB of memory.

2. I can't boot the machine reliably without interrupting the
bootloader and doing this:

boot -1 -2 (disable SMP, disable ACPI)
(I can't figure out how to disable ACPI in the BIOS, but I can disable SMP)

Can someone recommend a kernel config that might be more stable?

-current doesn't seem to be significantly different. I still have to
boot with -1 -2 to make it stable.

3. Some hardware is not supported on the motherboard, but the one that
hurts the most is the ethernet adapter:

# dmesg | grep ^vendor
vendor 8086 product 1911 (miscellaneous system) at pci0 dev 8 function
0 not configured
vendor 8086 product a131 (miscellaneous DASP, revision 0x31) at pci0
dev 20 function 2 not configured
vendor 8086 product a13a (miscellaneous communications, revision 0x31)
at pci0 dev 22 function 0 not configured
vendor 8086 product a121 (miscellaneous memory, revision 0x31) at pci0
dev 31 function 2 not configured
vendor 8086 product 15b8 (ethernet network, revision 0x31) at pci0 dev
31 function 6 not configured

4. My wm based gigabit ethernet adapter has performance problems, I
was told about this in another thread. So I'm using a USB cdce one for
now. Seems to work fine. I'd rather use a PCI-E card. Can someone
recommend one?

5. It "feels" generally slow. Slower than my 8 or so year old AMD
system with 1 gig of memory. But I'm not sure if this is real.

Ok, enough for now.

Andy