Today I had the opportunity to play with a 4*PIII-550Xeon machine with 4GB
RAM. Both the 20000416 snapshot's floppies and the latest mptest floppies
(dated feb 29) give some funny things from the boot loader, and then 
exploded at different places.

Here's some ten-finger-dump:

 >> whoever@i-forgot.to.note
 >> Memory 630/4093888 k
 Use hd1a:netbsd to boot sd0 ...
 ...
 [no symbol table formats found]
 warning: too little memory available; have -102178816 bytes, want 2097152 bytes
 running in degraded mode
 press a key to confirm


sounds fun, eh? Note that the ">> Memory" line looks ok - some overrun in
the boot loader? After a press on return, the kernel comes up as usual:

 Copyright TNF 
	...
 Copyright 1982-1993 
	The Regents Berkeley bla
 ...
 ... <normal kernel probes>
 ...
 real mem: 39?? PB			<- i'm fairly sure that WAS "PB"!
 ...
 fd0: ...

Then a bit more text is printed, but the machine immediately reboots (no
panic, no ddb) and I was not able to read the text (I tried several
times). The last things recognized are the floppy controller fdc0 and the
floppy fd0. What's next after that in the INSTALL kernel?

When I try the feb 29 mptest floppies, I get a "panic: vm_page_physget:
called _after_ bootstrap" immediately after the UCB Copyright. 

Can someone remind me how to get a bootfloppy(set) with serial line
bootblocks and kernel? 

Enable
  options        "CONSDEVNAME=\"com\"",CONADDR=0x3f8,CONSPEED=9600
in the INSTALL kernel, what else? probably DDB_ON_PANIC=1, what else,
esp. for the bootblocks?

Any clues? Anything I can try? I can try to arrange a debugging session
where I can act as remote terminal, if needed...


 - Hubert

-- 
NetBSD - Better for your uptime than Viagra