Re: NetBSD/arc 9.2 on Acer PICA

[Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost>]

> Dig out my old Acer PICA-61 and tried NetBSD 9.2 on it. Surprise
> surprise, it works !
> Thanks to Izumi Tsutsui for some of the work done last year to restore
> NetBSD/arc.

Oh, good to hear :-)

I'm also glad to see MI ncr53x9c(4) driver (i.e. asc(4) SCSI) actually
works on the real PICA. (though it worked on gxemul emulators)

> Haven't done any extensive testing but the installer boots from cd, the
> installation works without any problem and the installed system seems
> fine, with the only issue I have is the Arc bios doesn't seems to
> recognize the FAT partition setup by NetBSD with the loader in it,

What command did you try on ARC BIOS (maybe "run program" menu)?

There is a dumb instruction in INSTALL.html but it could be wrong:
 https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.2/arc/INSTALL.html#Booting%20from%20CD-ROM%20and%20Hard%20disk

> Booting a kernel in the FFS partition via bootloader in the FAT partition:
>     scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)boot scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)netbsd

"partition(1)" means the first entry of the FDISK (MBR) partition
and this assumes the sysinst(8) installer creates FAT at the first
partition. NetBSD FFS should be in the second entry.

The sysinst(8) was completely reorganized since NetBSD 9.0
so I'm afraid something could be wrong on creating FAT for
the bootloader.

Thanks,
---
Izumi Tsutsui