Hi all,

Recently I installed NetBSD 1.5.1 on an old Compaq Contura Aero 486SX25 laptop.
After some minor issues with finding the correct disk geometry I used a P2
to install the disk. With this installation, the 486 booted the GENERIC kernel
without problems. NetBSD detected all available hardware and prompted me with
a login.

However, after logging in (as root) I found several tools to dump core. Amongst
these are ping (pings are sent out, the destination machine replies, but the
laptop doesn't show a reply-line for the ping. When I break off ping, it dumps 
core), ps (ps shows a huge lot of garbage with some readable text (the process
name) and then dumps core), top (after type 'top' and pressing enter nothing 
appears to happen (my shell seems to hang) a break starts up top which just
sits there. Another break and top dumps core.

Other tools show erratic data : uptime gives me a long line of garbage for the
average load, ftp says 100% downloaded from the first bit it receives and 
doesn't divide the bytes received by the time it took to receive them (so
after downloading 13Mb of data, ftp says 13Mb per second (over my 10Mbit NIC))
and a load of other such problems. Also, after a few minutes of uptime, the
box crashes without any extra effort on my side.

I figured that most of these problems were related to some form of division
so I thought maybe there was no FPU emulation in the kernel and built me
a kernel WITH it. After trying several kernels I gave up : it just keeps
giving me the same errors.

Are there any known bugs with 1.5.1 and FPU emulation ? I've been running
1.5 on a really old 386 without problems for almost a year now. Searching
the web(site) resulted in some FPU emulation problems on other platforms,
but not on i386. Anyone got a clue ?

Cheers,

Paul