On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 22:39:27 -0600, Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org> wrote:
> Your question is a bit vague, I guess.  (^&

Yeah, it was, and I have another day of progress to help out a little...

> Which version of NetBSD/amd64 are you looking at (well, you said the
> "snapshot", but I haven't checked its version)?

I successfully built the 2.0 release branch yesterday and rebooted and
this seems to have fixed things. Where things wouldn't build, now they
do. This is cool. I'm much happier now.

> And "stable and usable" for what?

Desktop stuff mostly. I've noticed that I'm losing some of the stuff
I'd run under Linux emulation now. I guess I need to figure out how to
get the 32 bit stuff working. I generally don't want to have a box
that will cause problems while I'm getting desktop type work done, and
so far since yesterday I haven't had any which is great. Other than
the tools I would use under Linux emulation, that is.

>  * Lack of support for some of my hardware at first.  E.g., no DMA
>    support for the hard drive.  This wasn't fatal, but as I recall it
>    was a whole lot faster to do *everything* via NFS from an i386 than
>    to use the local hard drive.

I appear to have DMA working on an older ATA66 drive. Maybe this was fixed?

>  * I have had to turn off IOAPIC in my kernel config and build a custom
>    kernel in order to keep my hardware all configuring and to keep it from
>    dying (losing interrupts) during normal use.  I have never seen this
>    officially fixed; the GNU/LINUX kernel, at least around January 2004
>    or so, actually disabled IOAPIC if it detected this motherboard
>    chipset that I'm using.  (nVidia nForce3.)

Hmm. This might be a sporadic problem with my Via based board too.
I'll give this a try. Although I don't think I've seen this since
going to the latest release branch.

>    Avoid nVidia's motherboard chipset if you can.  )^&

Yep, did that.

>  * I've had two memory modules go bad on me.  I'm now on my third, and
>    keeping my fingers crossed.  This is just flakey hardware and nothing
>    to do with NetBSD.

I had one that was bad that came with the box. Luckily I had another
so I'm "limping" along on 512 meg (I got this thing both to play with
in NetBSD and play games under Billdows, so I wanted a gig for that).

>  * X loses mouse button events if the mouse is moving while the button
>    is clicked/released.  I believe that M. Bouyer(sp?) confirmed that
>    he also saw this on the Alpha, so it is believed to be a general
>    X problem, not a NetBSD or AMD64-specific issue.  (But it certainly
>    does not manifest with my i386 boxes---same mice.)

I have not seen this yet.

>  * Similarly, I've noticed that occasionally CapsLock releases have been
>    lost, though I can't correlate them to mouse motion.  I never had
>    this with the i386, and have an i386 laptop that is running a not-too-
>    distant -current.  (I can't get the laptop fully up to date due to
>    another issue that I haven't the expertise to quickly solve and that I
>    have not yet been able to even *slowly* solve.  (^&)

Haven't seen this yet either.

> Presently, my system is pretty stable, though the particular revision
> I am on (2.99.10 kernel or so) tends to sporadically seize up.  I did
> not experience that with older kernels.  It has not got to the point that
> I've bothered trying to build a new kernel in the hopes of fixing this
> issue.

Haven't seen this since going to release. I'm guessing some hardware
is particularly flaky. PCs just aren't too high quality anymore.

> I use my AMD64 as my primary system.  The biggest annoyance I've had is
> having to adjust to using links-gui as my graphical browser.  links has
> its virtues, but I didn't like being forced to change.  (^&  (No other
> graphical browser I've tried has worked for me under NetBSD/amd64.
> See a recent thread on this list.)

I'm using Firefox right now as a matter of fact. It wouldn't build
before I upgraded to the latest release branch, now it does. I can
probably try making a package if you want to try it (after the weekend
though).

> I do not run any of the 2.0 release candidates on my AMD64 box,
> however.  I expect that I'll continue to track -current for a while,
> so my experiences may not be directly relavent to your question.
> Still, it's an answer of sorts.  (^&

I thought I was going to go to current but I haven't seen a need so
far. Maybe I'm missing something?

Andy