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

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, 1 Apr 2023 at 23:46, B 9 <hackerb9%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 2:21 PM David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
>> OK, I'm running a final build of
>> 388e93b5d10e1d069771de62b3f9bf4227dedb34,
>
> Do you need anyone to test it out? I don't see that kernel in sync.absd.org/hpcmips.
> Also, is this delving deeper into 2016-07-11? That kernel is also missing.

It failed due to an unrelated change, but parking this due to your comment below

>> I would expect this to work just fine. The above commit was quite
>> large, and there were a bunch of follow up commits to the above,
>> tweaking things for different mips platforms after it, so it is
>> *possible* that  the initial vr41 issues from the above change were
>> resolved, and the breakage comes from something else, but Occam
>> suggests that its most likely the above.
>
> I do not wish to be on the wrong side of Occam's razor, but I should mention that netbsd-2016-10-01 boots past the pcic0 error and seems to work for me without coredumps but 2017-01-01 seemed to have the same problem as 9.3.

That is definitely interesting - I think it's more worthwhile me
trying to build versions between 2016-10-01 and 2017-01-01 for testing

> To summarize what I've seen of the various kernel builds:
>
> 2016-07-10: Works, no coredump
> 2016-07-12: Does not boot (stuck after pcic0)
> 2016-08-01: Does not boot (blank screen)
> 2016-09-01: [I think this was the same as 10-01, if I recall correctly]
> 2016-10-01: Boots, no coredump. (This should be verified by someone else as my configuration is a bit askew. I'm testing with a 9.3 userland).
> 2017-01-01: Boots, but dumps core (possibly the same problem as afflicts 9.3)

Insert another shout out to anyone else with hpcmips hardware seeing
this issue to install netbsd-7 and then try the 2016-10-01 kernel

> P.S. How do I go about creating a root.fs file to boot from so I don't keep corrupting my disk every time I test a kernel? Can I just `dd` the root partition from the netbsd-sysinst kernel?

If you boot from the sysinst kernel, or even the actual install in
single user mode you can dd the root filesystem to a file on any other
mounted media. I can help to run a quick fsck first to make sure it's
all good. It might be faster piped via gzip (probably not with a high
compression option).

David