Hello,

I installed NetBSD on my Amiga recently and had some problems to get it
going because it always hang after the kernel tried to start init. The
problem was that /dev was empty but at that time I was a bit frustrated
that no message was displayed stating this. So I asked ignatios why init
doesn't show errors and he answered that the problem is that init is a
normal process and want to use the /dev/console for output which didn't
work in my case. And now for the solution we came up after several mails:

There should be a new kernel function which only works for a process with
the PID 1 and which uses the *kernel* function to display text on the
console (same as the kernel during bootup). This would allow init to
display error messages even before anything is correctly set up. After
init, the next processes can safely use syslog(), so there is no need to
allow them to use this function but for init, there are situations where
syslog() can fail (like mine), so IMHO init (which is a special process)
should be allowed a special behaviour.

--
Aaron "Optimizer" Digulla      Team AMIGA          AROS Head of Development
Author of XDME, ResTrackLib, CInt.		   (since no one else wanted)
"(to) optimize: Make a program faster by improving the algorithms rather than
by buying a faster machine."