Re: NetBSD 4.0 RC2 on Cats

[Chris Gilbert <chris%dokein.co.uk@localhost>]

Dave Daniels wrote:
> I have a Cats running Cyclone 1.2 as the bootloader. I am
> pleased to say that NetBSD 4.0 RC2 installed without any problem
> on it. It also boots without any problems. (I could not get
> NetBSD 3.1 to work: it would install but not boot, I think due
> to the size of the kernel being too large for Cyclone 1.2. Well,
> this is certainly not the case with 4.0.) Trying to run an
> Xserver just locks up the machine and the network interface does
> not work but otherwise it all looks great. I also successfully
> built my own kernel and so have a slightly slimmer kernel as
> well now.

Glad to hear things are working for you :)

Which network card do you have?  (what's the output from dmesg?)  If
it's a tlp, you may find that disabling tlp and enabling de will help.
There are some issues where the phy on some cards isn't detected.
(oddly something in my intr branch has fixed that problem, so it is a
platform specific bug)

As for the X server I have to admit to not having used X on cats for
some time.  I do plan to install RC2 onto one of my cats and kick off
pkgsrc builds for 2007Q3.

> I would like to thank all the NetBSD developers for their work
> on NetBSD 4.0. The Cats is not exactly what you would call a
> mainstream NetBSD platform, but NetBSD 4.0 works really well on
> it. Thanks!

arm is a pretty active area, so cats does gain when anyone
fixes/improves the core arm code :)  I'm hoping that the next NetBSD
release will have some more tidy ups to the cats code which should
improve things further.  I just wish I had more time to dedicate to NetBSD.

Thanks,
Chris