On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 03:18:32PM -0500, Peter Eisch wrote:

> My build system has become more and more useless under the fresher releases
> of netbsd-4.  It won't boot at all, hanging at various places, unless I
> 'boot -s' and then 'exit' once in single-user.  Most interesting is the
> reporting of the CPU speeds.  This system has three 900MHz/100MHz/2M xeons
> but note how they're reported.  The kernel is a GENERIC.MP with a few other
> additives, nothing major.  Then jump down to the end and note that two of
> the CPUs aren't even started.
> 
> I'd like to help sort this out, but I'm not sure where to start.  I can't
> boot a kernel with ACPI and DIAG. I can't boot ACPI without invoking
> incantations.  I can't build/boot a 'no acpi' kernel into MP.  This was a
> rock-solid system under 3.x.  Is there a document that describes who should
> avoid netbsd-4 somewhere?

I just fixed a bunch of issues in -current with secondary CPU startup. My
DL580 suffered from very similar issues to your machine, but it now boots
and runs successfully with ACPI enabled. Would you be able to try a kernel?
You could build one from anoncvs; I have put a precompiled one here:

	http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/netbsd.bz2

Thanks,
Andrew