On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Todd Whitesel wrote:

> > Uh...printing which numbers? The ones that print like [123+456]+768.etc.
> > with the spinner are actually printed by the second-stage boot
> > loader.
> 
> Yeah, those. It does it nearly at the end, so I'm not sure if it is the
> boot loader that dies or if bombing back to the bootrom kills the last
> few characters -- can that ever happen with the Sun OF console ?

Hard to say. Can you boot it on a serial console and log the output to a
file (I use pkgsrc/*/rtty for this) so you can catch the last few numbers
that are printed? Given that output, you could look at the last number,
compare it to size(1) on the kernel, and see that way if the kernel is
being entirely loaded.

> Four 16 MB SIMMs, so it wouldn't be a lack of memory.

No. What I was thinking was that in current the second-stage boot loader
was being relocated above 4 MB, but since it's a physical relocation,
it was being relocated into memory that didn't exist on my 16 MB IPX
(which has 4 MB chunks of memory mapped at 0 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB and 48
MB--4 x 4 MB SIMMs).

Of course, the reason that Charles moved it up there was because the
INSTALL kernel had grown too large to load otherwise. Has the INSTALL
kernel grown at all since 1.1? Perhaps this is indeed what's happening
to you; the boot loader is overwriting itself with the kernel that it's
loading. The behaviour you're getting (prints everything just fine until
near the end, when it trashes itself, producing an illegal instruction
exception) would be perfectly consistent with that. Stripping the kernel
would probably be a good way to test this theory, if you get past the
first two sets of numbers and the `]' during the load.

BTW, if you need to do the serial console thing and you don't have the
stuff to set it up at home, send me private mail and I'll see if I can't
give you access to some of my stuff.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   917 532 4208   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org