Subject: Re: Floppy and EB164's
To: matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>
From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>
List: port-alpha
Date: 11/09/1999 17:29:53
    Date:        Tue, 09 Nov 1999 12:06:15 +1100
    From:        matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>
    Message-ID:  <10886.942109575@eterna.com.au>

  | i tried older
  | srm's (down to version 3.8) and then tried 5.5 again.  since then i've
  | not had *any* problems with my SRM

To me this suggests either that the older SRMs have some slightly different
format for the nvram, that the newer ones then respect when they find (an old
one won't take any notice of a new format it had never heard of of course)
and then NetBSD is compatible with the old, but not the new

or the old SRMs do some init of the nvram that the newer ones don't do, or
don't do properly (that's the kind of bug I can believe would not be found
easily by the SRM developers, as they quite possibly never tested on a system
which hadn't moved up through the SRM versions in sequence).

Now, if someone has an old SRM version saved away somewhere, and can make it
available to the rest of us to test, then before I install it I will see if
I can find the NVRAM and save its contents before running the old SRM, and
again after, and see if there's a difference, and if so, what it is.  That
might be enough to distinguish the above cases, which would be useful, as
if it is the first, we might be able to update NetBSD to handle whatever
is newer, and if it is the latter, someone might be able to contact the SRM
people and let them know of the problem.

kre