Re: NetBSD/hpcmips userland crashes (Re: IBM Workpad z50 dmesg collection)

[B 9 <hackerb9%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 2:28 PM David Brownlee abs%absd.org@localhost
<http://mailto:abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:

On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 at 14:50, Michael <allstarzero%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> >
> > Hi! I have a MobilePro 780 and a MobilePro 790 I can test on.
>
>  that could definitely be two useful data points :)
>
I am dusting off my Mobile Pro 800 which still happily runs NetBSD-1.6. I’d
been thinking I’d upgrade it before finding someone who would want it as a
retro-computer. Unfortunately, trying to install NetBSD-9.3 onto a new
compact flash card has been impossible because all the sysinst tools keep
dumping core, almost randomly. (The ping program is an exception as it
always dies with a floating point exception when I hit ^C.)

For example, if I start up vi and hit ^Z to suspend the process, most of
the time it works, but often vi gets killed.

I noticed that the problem seems to occur when programs were sent a benign
signal, but they would die claiming some other signal had been received. I
wrote a simple script, itsatrap, that shows which signal was received. It
always reported the signal correctly, when it could catch it, but after
acting on it, sometimes its parent process would die with a random signal
(“Unknown signal number”, “Abort”, “Illegal instruction”, “CPU over time
limit”). For example: If I run chroot /targetdisk then run itsatrap & and
send it a signal via kill -1 %1, the chroot process could die with SIGABRT.

—B9