Re: NetBSD 7.0.1 on a Quadra 660AV

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 03:38:41PM -0600, Mac User wrote:
> I installed NetBSD 7.0.1 on a 68 MB Quadra 660AV using
> the traditional method (no CD-ROM drive). NetBSD 7.0.1
> was installed on a partition that fit within the first
> GB on the disk. The NetBSD Installer apparently can't
> handle partitions larger than 1 GB, though Mkfs seems
> able to create them.

What exactly fails?
This is from my 660AV running -current:

Filesystem         Size       Used      Avail %Cap Mounted on
/dev/sd0a           13G       1.8G        11G  14% /
kernfs             1.0K       1.0K         0B 100% /kern
procfs             4.0K       4.0K         0B 100% /proc
ptyfs              1.0K       1.0K         0B 100% /dev/pts

and I created it with sysinst, as that is the only working way I found
to prepare the apple partition stuff and get it booted from a single
disk.

> 1) The system would repeatedly crash at boot time about
> 15 minutes into running "Updating fontconf cache", with
> a panic following an "Out of address space" error. Since
> swap (a 2 GB partition) had already been initialized, the
> script that updates the fontconf cache must have been
> wanting more than 2 GB of memory.

I guess the panic was more likely about kernel VA space. I don't
see it with -current on my machine.

> 3) Boot and login times seemed a little slow. A couple
> months ago some changes were made to the startup scripts
> to speed them up, and that worked on a Mac IIfx running
> NetBSD 6.1.5. I haven't tried installing NetBSD 7.0.1 yet
> on my Mac IIfx, so I don't know whether those changes
> ended up in 7.0.1.

That is:

etc/rc.subr                                     1.97

        Speed up multiuser boot time on slow machines.  PR#50046.
        [phx, ticket #1015]

which only made it to netbsd-7 (and not any of the more restrictced
branches).

You can grab the latest version of netbsd-7 from the daily builds
on nycdn.netbsd.org.

Martin