On 2004.4.26, at 04:51 PM, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> my Q610 with netbsd 1.6.2 gave up his spirit. After the "bong" I get 
> the
> "sad mac sound" immediatly and no video output to read a possible code.
> Removing all ram, vram, disks, etc, did not help.

Stephan mentions the battery. I've seen it, too. Some models will boot 
with a dead battery, some won't. And I think the battery may day in a 
way that corrupts the PRAM, so some that should boot with a dead 
battery might require hitting the PRAM reset switch or key combination.

> What I end up is having a hard disk with 1.6.2 and a stock kernel on 
> it.

I hope you haven't tossed the motherboard yet. The CPU is likely to be 
a full '040, which is something you would not want to throw out.

     http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/q610.shtml

> I have tried putting that disk in my other macs: a IIsi (with FPU on 
> the
> doughter card) and on a LC3 (no FPU) and on a IIci.

Does netBSD support daughter card FPUs without special drivers or 
configuration?

> the results are:
> - on the IIci the boot process doesn't finish! a kernel panic occours. 
> That
> IIci was running happily 1.6.1 and is now an OpenBSD box. I have no 
> real
> interest in getting that particular disk to boot there, but I tried 
> and I
> wonder.
>
> - the IIsi and the LC3 boot and get a prompt, but the environment is
> unstable. Trying to compile something usually ends up in a seg-fault. 
> It is
> not really predictable though.

I would almost expect the FPU-less LC3 to not boot.

> So I wonder if it is posssible just to switch disks this way? I have a
> standard install on that disk with a stock kernel which should support 
> all
> those macs?
> The LC3 has no FPU, so the problem may lie there (or has 1.6.2 
> improved the
> situation with fpu emu a bit?)

Emulation? what emulation? From what I've read on this list recently, I 
have the idea that emulation has fallen through the cracks in recent 
versions of netBSD.

(I never liked emulation. It takes a sort of architecture not really 
seen much on microprocessors to make instruction emulation as fast as 
subroutine calls. I never really understood why Motorola wasted design 
and silicon on the incomplete emulation architecture they shoe-horned 
into the 68K series. Not that I could have done any better.)

> The best solutiuon would be to have q950 support! I have such a beast 
> and it
> would be ideal to do 68k compiling, which is wat I was doing on that 
> q610.
> Try to get software working for our platforms! And I see that at least 
> the
> Java effort stirred some interest.
>
> Cheers,
>     Riccardo

I do hope the 610 hasn't gone to the dump yet.

Joel Rees