Not so recent MIPS breakage

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

something is rotten in MIPS-land.
For example, when trying to build tcsh from pkgsrc I get weird error messages 
about malformed patches, but looking at the patch files there is nothing wrong 
with them. Also, looking at man pages ( anything of non-trivial length will do 
) produces occasional stretches of ^@^@^@^@.
This is on sgimips -current, and it's been happening for a long time now. 
Similar issues have been reported on other MIPS ports.
Until today I thought this is a cache or dma syncing issue and I've spent hours 
staring at diffs in arch/mips without finding anything. The funny thing that I 
found today is that the data corruption apparently happens when piping data 
between processes, not when DMAing stuff in or out. For example ( sticking with 
pkgsrc/shells/tcsh ):
- patch <patch-aa gives weird errors as above
- patch -i patch-aa succeeds without problems
I have no idea why I don't see any of this on non-MIPS hardware, and it doesn't 
seem to happen on my Gdium either ( or at least not as bad )
Also, it doesn't seem to be entirely random - shells/tcsh pretty much always 
fails at exactly the same spot.
Any ideas what to look at?

have fun
Michael