Subject: NetBSD on an IBM ThinkPad 365E?
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Duncan McEwan <duncan@MCS.VUW.AC.NZ>
List: port-i386
Date: 02/22/2000 13:50:28
Is anyone successfully running NetBSD on one of these laptops.
When I try booting (either 1.4.1 or an almost -current of early Feb) off
the install flopp{y,ies} the devices seem to be probed correctly but then
system system wedges sometime before sysinst starts up.
I built an install floppy with DDB enabled but once it has wedged,
<ctrl-alt-esc> doesn't drop me into DDB.
Next I tried setting breakpoints at various places through main() to see if I
could narrow down where it was hanging. Unfortunately, when I did this, the
system got all the way to uvm_scheduler() at which point I gave up on that
strategy. A couple of times when I did this it actually got as far as starting
sysinst before wedging. Does this suggest some kind of timing problem (perhaps
associated with the enabling of interupts?). I'm not sure what I can do next
to track it down further.
There are a couple of issues relating to Thinkpads mentioned in the FAQ but
I don't think either apply here (I'm happy to be corrected on that though!)
One is that the apm(4) manual page says that APM_DISABLE_INTERRUPTS needs to be
set to 0 in the kernel config for "most IBM ThinkPads". Well, the INSTALL
kernel doesn't have apm turned on so I don't think this should be a problem
(especially since the reported problem this corrects is that wakeups from
suspend fail - which is not my problem). But just to be safe, I built an
INSTALL kernel with "apm0 at mainbus0" uncommented and also included "options
APM_DISABLE_INTERRUPTS=0". It didn't make any difference.
The other issue I know about is setting PCIC_ISA_INTR_ALLOC_MASK to an
appropriate value to make sure that the correct interupts get allocated to
pccard devices. But my problem isn't with getting pccards recognised
correctly.
I believe this laptop has some kind of Cyrix CPU and I recall reading about
problems with the cache with some Cyrix CPU's. So I looked through the bios
setup (ctrl-alt-f11 - thanks to someone on this list!) to see if I could turn
some cache options off, but didn't see anything useful.
Does anyone know of any other issues that affect older ThinkPads that might
result in these symptoms.
Duncan
PS: I had given up on getting NetBSD on this laptop, but then it's owner tried
a FreeBSD boot floppy with their experimental PCMCIA support and it worked. So
now I feel I need to defend the hono{u,}r of NetBSD... :-)