NetBSD 1.1 & Fastlane - it works (sort of)

[tingo%icenet.no@localhost (Torfinn Ingolfsen)]

Finally!

I've successfully installed NetBSD 1.1 on my Amiga 4000/040 with a Fastlane
and a CV64.
I've learned a few things, I will report them here so others won't have to
live through the same pain as I have. :-)

My system:
Standard Amiga 4000/040 with 16 + 2 MB RAM. The 3640 card is rev 3.1.
Fastlane Z3 card, revision 2.2, with 5 SCSI units attached.
Cybervision CV64 card with 4MB RAM.
(I also have a DblScan 400 "scandoubler" card, so that I can see PAL etc. on
my SVGA monitor.)

NetBSD is installed on a 636 MB SCSI drive (old Micropolis, with a weird
layout). Since I can't (currently) use any other (SCSI) devices, I've made an
ADOS partition on the drive, for transferring stuff to NetBSD.

Things learned:

1) If you use the Fastlane driver (ie. a SCSI drive connected to it) do NOT
   use any other SCSI devices! The kernel WILL lock up (sooner than you are
   ready for).
   Ie, do *not* mount or otherwise access other HD's, CD-ROM's, tape drives,
   etc. on the Fastlane bus. My IDE drive is occopied with other things, so I
   haven't been able to test if it locks up when doing transfers from that
   too.

2) If NetBSD doesn't like your disk (in my case it gave a "panic,
   cannot mount root" message when I tried to boot from the inst-11.fs on the
   swap partition), try to reconfigure the layout (ie. heads, cyls, etc.).
   That did the trick for me.

3) NetBSD seems to *insist* on reading the number of cylinders directly from
   the (scsi) drive istelf, instead of from the RDB. (No. I don't know whats
   the correct way, I just observed this). Change the other parameters (heads,
   blocks per track) to match number of blocks instead.

4) NetBSD doesn't like disks with just one head! :-)

5) You might have to disable reselect (disconnect) on your drive; I had to.
   You use binpatch on the kernel for this (under AmigaOS), but the how-to
   info isn't easily available, so here goes:
   1> binpatch -s _sfas_inhibit_disc=-1 netbsd
   1> binpatch -s _sfas_inhibit_disc[1]=-1 netbsd
   where 'netbsd' is the name of your kernel (actually, this disconnects
   reselect on all targets, but as long as you can't use them...). Thanks to
   Michael L. Hitch for telling me how to do it. (Maybe this info should be in
   the FAQ?)

That's it.

I also tried the kernel with (corrected?) CV64 support (netbsd-cv64console-
bin11.gz) found on Regensburg, but it always gave me a vm_fault, so I can't
use it, I have to find out what's wrong first.

Now I'm going to install the sources, so I can have a norwegian keymap at
last. :-)
-- 
 Torfinn - Thor 2.22 No:#1015 (msg. written 18-Aug-96 13:46:56)
Email (work): torfinn%anon.hfk.mil.no@localhost
Email (home): tingo%icenet.no@localhost