Ross Harvey writes:
 > What's the prompt?  The NetBSD/alpha faq does give some basic info
 > on SRM usage, if that's where you are...and it is programmable for
 > action on power up. (``>>>set auto_action boot'', IIRC)
There seems to be a minidebugger below srm, which gets called
on traps in srm code. It gives a traceback with register dumps
and seems to support some simple commands.
 > 
 > > This problem does not occur with the workstation console. When you
 > > commented out the following makeoptions line in NetBSD 1.3 with
 > > serial console,
 > >
 > > # set kernel load address a bit higher to allow kernel to be netbooted.
 > > # if not netbooting, the "makeoptions LOADADDRESS" line can be commented
 > > # out to save a fair chunk (~850k) of RAM.
 > > makeoptions     LOADADDRESS="fffffc0000300000"
 > >
 > > the result was similar. But I think in NetBSD 1.4, the
 > > load address is always 0xfffffc0000300000 ?!
 > 
 > I'm a bit confused here, but with respect to the 1.4 address, we always
 > use the higher load address now, because we are able to use non-contiguous
 > physical memory segments and as a result it doesn't waste any space.

One more observation: With NetBSD 1.3 and makeoptions
LOADADDRESS commented out (so the kernel loaded at a lower
address), kernel printfs sometimes seemed to cause panics -- not
during boot but later on. At least the machines were very
unstable. When loading the kernel high under NetBSD 1.3 the
machines did not have this problem -- and I have quite a few
multias.

One wild guess is that the multia srm uses some special memory area
when using the serial console which gets stomped upon by the NetBSD
kernel when the kernel on NetBSD 1.3 gets loaded low or on NetBSD 1.4.
 
The `srm panic' actually happens when the console is reattached to
the serial port -- at least this is the way I read the traceback
(it even prints symbolic names).

Jürgen Weiß

-- 
Juergen Weiss		| Universitaet Mainz, Zentrum f"ur Datenverarbeitung,
weiss@uni-mainz.de      | 55099 Mainz, Tel: 06131/39-6361, FAX: 06131/39-6407