> Just to try it out, I hooked up a 6100 with ZTerm over serial. Even 
> in a kernel that doesn't give me problems (1.5.1_ALPHA) I get 
> bombarded with debugging info when I do "write/l ncr53c9x_debug 
> 0xffff"... Is there someway to turn some of this off?

Yes.  Basically, 0xffff is turning on all possible tracing in the
driver.  I want to see what the sequence of events is just before
the failure.  What you can do is break into the debugger after you
have started bonnie, set that variable, run until you see the error,
then break into the debugger and reset it to zero.  What I usually
do is log a serial console session to a file, then search through
it with grep or vi (depending on the size of the file ;-)...

> If I compile the kernel with the "ncr53c9x_notag = 1", will some of 
> these non-error debugging messages go away? It is very difficult to 
> start bonnie with them going. Maybe if I made syslogd more picky 
> about what it sent to console?

It's much easier to do this in single-user mode.  The volume of
"spontaneous" data shouldn't be too bad there.

> How much do you want? It would be a lot easier if I could get rid of 
> the debugging messages that come up before I start bonnie.

Probably a handful of lines before the error.  You could just send me
the whole log (it doesn't need to go to the list ;-) gzipped or
something.  It should compress _really_ well.

> Sorry, I've never used [gd]db for debugging before, and only compiled 
> my first kernel a few days ago...

:-)  New year, new experiences!  :-)

-allen

-- 
 Allen Briggs                     briggs@wasabisystems.com
 http://www.wasabisystems.com/    Quality NetBSD CDs, Sales, Support, Service