Ok.. I will do my best to attempt to explain this bug..

What the problem seems to be is that my com ports no longer function.

Previously i was using a kernal dated around dec 24th. 1993.  I just updated
to the precompiled binaries in current/arc/i386 (dated may 3)

The first thing i noticed is a change in the way fifo's are handled.. different
messages from the kernal at bootup.. 
the kernal now reports :
ie0 unknown at&t board type code 0    (i dont HAVE any at&t boards!)
ie0 cant map 3C507 RAM in high memory
(wtf is that?)

ok.. but besides that..  I attempted to use cu/tip afterwards.. invoking it
with cu -s38400 -l/dev/com0
after a short wait:
cu: Write error Input/output com0
then back to my prompt.

nor does getty function any more, attempts to login to my dumb terminal result
in a garbage string when control is passed to login, and a subseqent locking of the terminal.    getty doesnt even bother to pass control to login when logging
in remotely.

What strikes me as really odd about all this.. is that I didnt change any of
my config files.  (yes i tried doing that later on too) As soon as I booted
with my new kernal..  everything stopped working.

other minor things include my keyboard locking up after 5 characters are typed
in an xterm after booting X. (groan) and the fact that it took me a week to
re-enable root logins.  (it would freeze the connection after it read a line
out of my .login that had stty in it.)

Im really at a complete loss here.   

another minor thing is that when i tried to compile a program with the 
ncurses 1.8 libs, it would result in a binary that had a complete lack of
ability to write to the screen.  Old programs compiled with ncurses work fine,
but no programs compiled under this kernal can access the screen.


One other minor qualm is the fact that gzip and tar are dynamicly linked.
this causes the unfortunate problem that while attempting to update your
/usr/lib tree, tar clobbers libc.9.0.so and causes it's own core dump.  leaving
you with a 0 byte libc.so.

Well.. thats really all the relevant info I have.  I apologize if its not
sufficient.  Ive never tried to report bugs before.. i usually work around them.

(oh.. one minor note, a version of kermit i compiled under netbsd0.9 is the
only access i have to the modem.  oddly enough.. IT still works. which
seems to point to the trouble being in cu/getty or the kernal's dealing with
them.)

thanx for at least reading this.

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