Re: Insights from successful, yet painful, install attempt.

[Roc Vallès <vallesroc%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi Carlos,

On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 at 16:42, Carlos Milán Figueredo
<cmilanf%hispamsx.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> Hi Roc, nice to meet you!
>
> From: port-amiga-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost <port-amiga-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost> On Behalf Of
> Roc Vallès
> Sent: lunes, 4 de octubre de 2021 0:51
> > *** hardware
> > - Amiga 1200.
> > - Blizzard 1230mkIV with 68030@50MHz, 68882@50MHz, 64MB RAM.
> > - ~120GB 2.5 HDD.
> > - 3Com 3c589 PCMCIA NIC.
> > - Null-modem (RX<>TX / GND--GND) cable, attached to another computer running
> > tio.
>
> Nice setup!
>
> > But I had to discard most of them, because they require the netbsd partition
> > to be below the 4GB point in the disk.
>
> The installation manual state the convenience of the root partition being in the 32 bit boundary, < 4GB due to kickstart limitations. However, the only several months old kickstart 3.2 removes this limitation. Anyway, I kept my NetBSD partitions below this 4 GB limit to avoid compatibility issues. I usually boot the OS with the runbootblock utility; for some reason OS 3.2 and booting from early startup menu doesn't play nice.
>

Re: 3.2, did they really solve booting from bootblocks above 4GB? I
can't find anything on that subject.

> > The result of this work is here, including a binary:
> > https://github.com/rvalles/netbsd_amiga_loadbsd_pleasebuild
>
> Thanks for sharing! It is very appreciated!
>
> > As it turns out, the xstreamtodev tool, also found at installation/misc/,
> > does not support disk offsets above 4GB
>
> Indeed that's dangerous, thanks for pointing out. I have been many times to near wiping my hard disk.
>
> > I couldn't find any dd-like tools for AmigaOS, which suggests I should try
> > and implement some level of support for doing this on my pyamigadebug
> > (library behind AmigaXfer) in the future.
>
> There is one [1], but it targets the whole disk and not a specific partition, that is problematic.
>

1992... I'm afraid that's not going to support NSD nor TD64 ;-)

Once I have some time and energy, I'll try and figure out how talking
with scsi.library with 64bit offsets works. Having it on AmigaXfer
will give a lot of peace of mind. I could implement something like a
nbd server, which would go a long way re: giving me free remote access
to disks installed within Amiga computers.

> > This is a script that installs netbsd, very different from the installer
> > found in some other architectures. I do not know why Amiga port uses a
> > separate script (although I'm curious).
>
> So Amiga installation doesn't use sysinst? If it is a simple script, where could I find the source? The script does something useful: list the RDB partition table with NetBSD mapped device file, so you can chose the correct name for installation. I have not found any way to print this information after the install, that is quite annoying and dangerous if you intend to use dd.
>
> I asked a question on this list, but without definitive answer so far. Taking a look on how the scripts does this would help.
>

I have no idea how the install image is generated either. Being able
to look at all that would indeed help; besides fixing some, I'd
probably be able to find further issues :-)

> Apart from that, I felt your very same pains with the installation, like the lack of dhcp support. I ended up installing the system from WinUAE, by emulating a SCSI controller and a CD-ROM; then I took the CF card back to the real Amiga.
>

That's a sure-fire method that absolutely will work, but I avoid it on
principle. It'd feel like I'm giving up on doing it on-target.

> > It is possible to install the Netbsd Amiga port. It is far from a smooth
> > experience, including data-destroying bear traps, and requires an unrealistic
> > amount of expertise and patience. A bunch of flaws have been highlighted
> > above, along with specific suggestions on how to possibly tackle some of
> > them, in order to make the install experience less painful.
>
> Thanks for sharing your experience! I feel less lonely now 😊 There is an interesting blog post about experience and tips installing NetBSD 9.1 in a Commodore Amiga here [2]. It mentions some of the current challenges, like the ptys, the lack of X11 support for native chipset and the makemandb one.
>

Interesting 9.1 install experience link I hadn't read. I'm sad to hear
netbsd got slower/bloated in the years between his previous test and
now.

Now, I have some packages installed on that netbsd, and I've played
with X forwarding (displaying X11 apps on my laptop instead). I'm sad
about there being few packages built in the repositories. There's no
"modern" webbrowser (webkit/blink), but there's also no netsurf,
almost no window managers. Also no wxgtk, which also means no
wxpython.

As building packages on Amiga is slow (I have some experience doing
that on netbsd 8), binary packages are critical. I hear that the
reason we have few packages is that even with emulation, there's
serious ram restrictions (2GB and ~512MB per process, due to
limitations of current netbsd code around the m68k mmu), and that
severely restricts the packages that can be built natively, or
semi-natively (emulated m68k running netbsd).

> Regards,
> Carlos
>
> [1] https://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/dd
> [2] http://www.jeacle.ie/pub/articles/netbsd/#dec2020
>
> Carlos Milán Figueredo | HispaMSX System Operator | http://www.hispamsx.org | telnet://bbs.hispamsx.org | https://calnus.com

Best Regards,
Roc