Lemote Yeeloong observations

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

Since the announcement of support for the Lemote Yeeloong netbook in
the evbmips port, I've returned to experimenting^Wplaying with it.

I'm booting via tftp and using NFS root from my (netbsd-i386) fileserver
and build host.

The first few times booting the machine and finishing configuration went
OK.  At some point I ran into a problem such that "/dev/console" was
left 'chown'ed to my unprivileged user after a forced power-cycle.  This
issue was recently corrected.

I'd been attempting to build a few packages, but have been having various
toolchain failures.  "digest" is usually the root dependency of everything
else, but it can't make it through the "configure" phase.  The machine
hangs or most recently, the assembler failed, claiming it didn't support
some feature that was expected.  (If I can get the system stabilized,
I'll try to collect the results).

Lately I've been having trouble with corrupted files.  What I mostly
see is that on some subsequent boot, 'init' fails because "/etc/rc" is
truncated and causes 'sh' to terminate with an error.  I re-ran 'etcupdate'
with the {,x}etc.tgz sets as source and found a number of
truncations/corruptions, typically:

  /etc/rc
  /etc/defaults/rc.conf
  /etc/rc.d/network
  /etc/pf.os
  /dev/MAKEDEV
  /etc/services
  /etc/modulii
  /etc/mtree/NetBSD.dist
  /etc/mtree/set.etc
  /etc/mtree/set.xetc

and I think a couple more.  Sometimes 'diff' reports a file as being a
binary file rather than text.  Installing the fresh file from the source
sets generally restored proper operation.

Running 'etcupdate' again suggested changes that would return the files
to their damaged state (truncation usually coupled with null-padding at
the end).

When the machine hangs, the terminal driver is still active (pressing
return echos a blank line, etc.), but no input processing takes place.
Sometimes I can use Ctrl-Alt-Esc to drop into the debugger, but rebooting
from the debugger frequently doesn't work either, requiring a power-cycle.

Since the machine currently dual-boots gnewSense and OpenBSD from the
disk, perhaps I should arrange to boot a NetBSD kernel from disk with
the root filesystem on an SD card (/dev/sd0) and use swap, et al from
the local disk.  (As soon as I can get another suitable SD card).

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