In article <95328@olympus.wustl.edu> Dan writes:
>I built a new 1.0A kernel for my 1.0 sparc 1+ several days ago. I
>tried to boot it, and right after the rc printed `starting network'
>something got a bus error, dumped core, and then the kernel dropped
>into ddb with an alignment fault.  I played around with it a little,
>tried some different kernel options, without luck, but soon ran out of
>time so I left it alone.

Dan-
   I had a problem sort of like this when I was doing the 4/300 port.   
It turned out that all dynamically linked programs were crashing with 
a "Floating point exception"...   (A "divide by zero" problem to 
be exact)

   The problem turned out to be that my /var/run/ld.so.hints was bad,
and I was booting only to single user (so the problem never got solved
because ldconfig never got run).    One time I forgot to boot with
"-s" and let the system come all the way up... after it ran "ldconfig"
once everything was fine (no more floating exceptions).

   I consider this a bug, not a feature.   Either dynamic binaries should
be able to detect a corrupt ld.so.hints, or you should always run
"ldconfig" before running any dynamic-linked programs (e.g. right
before you mount /usr).   [you may in fact want to run it twice if you
NFS mount dynamic libs ?]

cheers,
chuck
-- 
Chuck Cranor, Graduate Student
Computer and Communications Research Center
Washington University, St. Louis MO  USA
E-Mail: chuck@maria.wustl.edu / cranor@udel.edu