buhrow@cats.ucsc.edu (Brian Buhrow) writes:

> 	Hello.  First I'd like to thank everyone for their responses to my
> questions about bad memory on my new used Sparc 1 and its relationship to
> the dead NVRAM chip.  I've determined that the memory was indeed flaky in
> the machine and have replaced the NVRAM chip, I bought the replacement from
> Mouser Electronics as listed on the Sun NVRAM/HOSTID FAQ at:
>         http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html
> It works fine and is now storing the time and ethernet adress correctly.
> 
> 	My current question has to do with the compatibility between th
> snapshot kernel of July 14, 1997 (netbsd.generic_scsi3) and the 1.2.1 Sparc
> user binaries.  When I boot this kernel on this machine, it either panics
> some time during the time it's executing /etc/rc, (panic: alignment fault)
> or it gets stuck because the master shell dumped core while it was running.
> It usually makes it to starting the timed.
> 	Is this a known incompatibility between  1.2g and 1.2.1 user binaries?
> If I upgraded to 1.2g binaries in user space as well as the kernel would I
> have more success?  Are the core dumps and the alignment faults related?  I

It certainly wouldn't hurt. I'd recommend grabbing the binaries from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sparc/snapshot/*.tar.gz and installing
them; it is easy to just extract the tar files, and then you can be
sure that things are up-to-date, especially w.r.t. the shared libs.

Also, do note that for some reason the kernel in the "1.2G" miniroot
is really a 1.2D (or was it 1.2E?) kernel from April; you should grab
the 1.2G kernel from the same directory as above (netbsd.GENERIC_SCSI3)
and use that...

--Aaron