NetBSD 10.0_BETA observations

[Robert Nestor <rnestor%mac.com@localhost>]

I’m in the process of installing 10.0_BETA on a system and I’ve seen some transient errors which appear to be related.

If a disk contains GPT wedges that I want to destroy and replace with new ones and I script the commands to do this, I often see errors indicating the disk doesn’t contain the information the previous command should have created.  Executing the same commands in the same sequence manually always seems to succeed.  It’s almost as if the preceding command didn’t have enough time to complete, or the changes weren’t written out to the disk in time for the subsequent command to execute correctly.  This occurs more on slower speed devices such as USB 2.0 attached disks or memory sticks.

While building some packages under the newly installed 10.0_BETA system on a SATA HD, I’ve occasionally seen a build fail with “directory not found”.  But the directory does exist and re-executing the package build command (without first cleaning the work build tree) always succeeds. Again, it seems like the command that created the directory to be used in the build process didn’t complete before the directory needed to be accessed.  In building about 400 packages I’ve seen this happen twice, the last time being in the build of seamonkey.

Attempting to install from a USB stick using the pre-built Installer image, or attempting to install a new system onto a USB disk isn’t always successful.  It often hangs during installation or can’t boot the new USB disk after installation says it has completed successfully.  Usually what I see is a screen full of memory ranges printed out and that’s it.  I wonder if these issues are also caused by delayed file system updates.

Installing from a SATA attached HD to another SATA attached HD worked fine for me though, other than the package build issue noted above.

BTW, all the HW and disks used in these attempts work fine under NetBSD 9.2 and Linux, even to the point that both systems can boot and run off SATA HDs, USB disks or USB Geek Sticks.