Subject: NFS root problems [Was: Re: Kernel cross build problems]
To: Ben Harris <bjh21@netbsd.org>
From: Ian Fry <Ian.Fry@sophos.com>
List: port-arm26
Date: 11/08/2001 09:48:40
On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 02:18:22PM +0000, Ben Harris wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Ian Fry wrote:
> > > Have you got root on NFS?  For some reason, writing over NFS seems to
> > > be flakey at the moment, which makes getting valid coredumps to debug
> > > difficult.
> > Yes, currently, I have root on NFS. Is it just root on NFS, or swapping
> > over NFS? If the latter, I might try to get local swap setup.
> I'm not sure if swapping over NFS is reliable or not.  I haven't tested it
> lately.

It appears that you're right - there is something not quite right about
writing over NFS, either swapping or to normal files. I was fiddling again
last night trying to get a local swap partition set up, but I was unable to
disklabel my hard disk (I get an 'DIOCGDINFO: inappropriate ioctl for device'
error) - I've made a smaller RISC OS partition(*), and run bb_netbsd.

So, I thought I'd dump part of the disk to a file to examine on another
machine. I did 'dd if=/dev/rwd0c of=/disk bs=512 count=1024', dd reported
that it had written 512k, but the file was only 470k (ish).

Ian.

(*) Does anybody know what the smallest partition is that RISC OS 3.1 can
understand? I tried creating one that is about 5M, but got 'Disk not
understood, has it been formatted?'. I've settled for a 15M partition for
now.