Hallo,

Installing NetBSD on some models of G4 (blue digital audio
w/o gigabit) is essentially impossible for who has only one 
machine.

The GENERIC kernel has the audio support, but the audio support 
is broken and on these models a number of spurious interrupts
floods the kernel. Depending on the model and the configuration
of the machine the thing has an impact varying from a "very slow"
machine to an almost-frozen one.

On a machine here the system was so slow that it had not finished
compiling a 12k C source after 45 minutes (100% cpu usage steady)
and this is only an example, all the system's "performance" was
consistent with this.

After gathering around some note about the problem in the audio
driver I moved the hard disk to another machine (same series, 
but different processor, 466 mhz instead of 400). The note I
found spoke about a slowness of the hard disk caused by the audio 
driver, what I experienced is a cpu problem.

I actually had the same  problem there but with less impact, 
and was able to compile a new kernel without audio support 
in *only* 3 hours, then moved back the hard disk to the original 
machine... and  there it worked nice (it's happily running ldap + 
qmail + postgreSQL + kerberos plus a few other little things in 
this moment, and does a "make clean ; make depend ; make -j 10"
of the kernel in a matter of minutes).

It would be a good idea to place in the distribution/ftp site
a kernel WITHOUT audio support. It wouldn't have been possible
to rebuild the kernel on the machine affected by this problem.

While there: sholdn't the limit on the physical amount of RAM
allowed (doesn't work with 1GB) and on the total addressing 
space (doesnt work with an amount of RAM+swap greater than
2 GB) be documented somewhere ? With nowaday's machines is quite
likely that people gets stuck by having a machine with 2 gigs
of ram, or one gig of ram and two of swap, not booting.

Regards,

Andrea

-- 
Andrea Cocito
Director of the Biocomputing Research Unit
Department of Experimental Oncology
Europen Institute of Oncology
Via Ripamonti 435, Milano - Italy
Tel. +39-02-57489857
Fax. +39-02-57489851