I decided to take our shark cluster up to the 1.4-ALPHA snapshot
recently, and found that 1.4 won't netboot on dnards with the August
1997 firmware, but will netboot with anything past February 1998.  Is
this a known bug (e.g., "Just go upgrade the bloody firmware"), or is
it something someone feels like fixing?  I'm not all that familiar
with the CS89x0 driver, or I'd peek in to it a bit more deeply.

  My most likely guess is that the old firmware is probably leaving
the device in some weird state, but that's a guess.  The patched
NetBSD 1.3.1 from DEC worked like a charm on sharks with this release
of the firmware, so it seems like a driver issue.

   The failure occurs in:

nfs_boot.c : nfs_boot_init()

        ifp = ifunit(root_device->dv_xname);
        if (ifp == NULL) {
                printf("nfs_boot: '%s' not found\n",
                       root_device->dv_xname);
                return (ENXIO);
        }

ifunit itself simply goes through the available devices and checks to
see if the names match.  It doesn't find cs0, and it bails out.
(I'm not actually building NetBSD kernels for these, so I'm not sure
if it's simply finding it by a different name, or what).

Many thanks.  Sorry for the limited debugging I did on this; if
nobody's familiar with the problem, I'll dig in to it further.

   -Dave

-- 
work: danderse@cs.utah.edu                     me:  angio@pobox.com
      University of Utah                            http://www.angio.net/
      Computer Science - Flux Research Group   "What's footnote FIVE?"