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

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

On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 4:31 AM David Brownlee abs%absd.org@localhost
<http://mailto:abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:


> We (mainly Alex) are trying to track down when the issue started by
> starting with a netbsd-7 install and then testing different kernels
> built from source between netbsd-7 and netbsd-8.
>
Where did you get the NetBSD 7 install? The earliest one I see on
NetBSD.org is 8.0.

I was able to get a filesystem formatted on wd0a using sysinst 9.3 (and a
lot of persistence), but I wasn’t able to download base or any other sets,
so I just copied over sysinst’s root to wd0a. I tried using /bin/sh as
/sbin/init, but that causes a kernel panic. (panic: init died (signal 0,
exit 0)). It’s been a while since I used NetBSD, but shouldn’t that work?

I'm also running into some issue with, I believe, power management. Shortly
after booting, I’ll see some message flash up on the screen and before I
have a chance to read it, the screen will turn off. This is happening with
the 9.3 kernel as well as the kernel from 2013-01-01. The power button does
not wake it up and I have to reset the machine all the way back to WinCE.
Any idea how to disable APM (and/or screensavers) at boot time?

—b9

So far we've narrowed it down to between 2016-07-01 and 2016-08-01,
> during which there were a few potential candidates for "breaking
> change". Most likely of them would be the switch of mips to the
> generic pmap code on July 11th -
>
> https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/f694fbd0571344422f046e53019ab383c37b8816
>
> I have a script building the hpcmips toolchain and GENERIC kernel for
> each day between 2016-07-01 and 2016-08-01 in a netbsd-8 chroot and
> uploading to sync.absd.org, it's up to 2016-07-25 now, and should be
> completed in a few more hours.
>
> If anyone following along would like to help testing :)
>
> - Confirm netbsd-7 install works on your device (install and boot up
> multiuser is a good test)
> - Download and test boot 2016-07-11 kernel from
> http://sync.absd.org/hpcmips/ (with the existing netbsd-7 install)
> - If it works, try 2016-07-12, and similar up to 2016-08-01 to see if
> you get a failure (*)
> - If it fails, try 2016-07-10, and similar back to 2016-07-01 to see
> if you get a success (*)
>
> *: Rather than trying each kernel in the sequence, use a binary chop -
> pick the one in the middle of the range, and based on whether that
> works pick the one in the middle of the top or bottom range and
> repeat. Make sure you keep a note of each tested kernel and the
> result. For reference, look up "git bisect" :)
>
> David
>