Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> 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

One giveaway is that the variables used in calculating the memory size
are all ints - even though most of the units are in pages, the chances
of wraparound are probably pretty good...

I think the first "Memory ..." line just uses bios info, which is why it
got it right.

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

If a compressed kernel is less than 1.4MB, then just put it on a
floppy, and installboot biosboot_com0.sym as the bootblocks instead of
biosboot.sym.  It should then "just work".

For now, having something with an embedded root filesystem is probably
not important, at least until the kernel gets that far.

Simon.