Re: DEC 1000A 5.0.0_PATCH system has problems booting after upgrade from 3.1_STABLE

[Nicolas Joly <njoly%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 03:18:45PM -0400, Paul Mather wrote:
> Recently I posted about needing to upgrade from netbsd-3 now that it  
> is end of life.  I decided to upgrade to netbsd-5-0, and, aside from  
> some space problems (oddly enough, on /usr, not / as I'd been fearing)  
> I managed to sort out, the upgrade was successful... well, largely so.
> 
> I have one problem: the system hangs at the console when trying to  
> reboot via "shutdown -r".  NetBSD manages to shut down properly.   
> Unfortunately, the system does not manage to reboot successfully.  It  
> hangs at the console.  This happens both when using my custom kernel  
> and a GENERIC kernel.  I even updated the bootblocks from the old ones  
> (NetBSD/alpha 1.6K) to the ones in 5.0.0_PATCH, all to no avail.
[...]
> Does anyone else encounter this problem, or have any suggestions for  
> fixing it?  The problem is inconvenient, rather than fatal--- 
> inconvenient because I don't have ready physical access to the machine  
> and so it makes remote updates requiring a reboot impossible, unlike  
> before. :-(

This is a known problem, see PR/40077.

The new power management framework pmf(9) now tries to poweroff all
the devices when halting the system; but the SRM on alpha does not
seems, at least on some machines, to handle it gracefully (does not
restore power to devices on reboot just like on x86 platform).

-- 
Nicolas Joly

Biological Software and Databanks.
Institut Pasteur, Paris.