Re: sgimips o2 and ARCS console in video mode hangs when it scrolls

[Adrian Chadd <adrian%freebsd.org@localhost>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2 Feb 2026 at 11:04, Adrian Chadd <adrian%freebsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 1 Feb 2026 at 19:41, Adrian Chadd <adrian%freebsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> > convention stuff and I'd like to establish if this /did/ work at some
> > point or (if Michael pointed out in a private email thread) we used to
> > get far enough in boot to bring up the crm driver to kick over to the
> > native console code before we caused arcbios to scroll.
>
> And fwiw, it boots fine if I do exactly the above - I commented out the physmem
> region printfs and the edid announce printfs and it managed to init crmfb
> early enough to continue booting.
>
> So I guess the next thing to do is to test with (much) earlier netbsd sgimips
> o2 kernels to see if scrolling ever worked or not.

I did boot various NetBSD IP3x installer kernels. It worked on 8.3 and
failed on 9.0.
The ARCS video console does scroll a whole bunch before the crmfb driver is
initialised and takes over.

So, something changed between those two releases that broke the environment ARCS
is expecting to be maintained during early boot on the O2.

I'm setting up a NetBSD 9.4 VM to build NetBSD trunk from 8 to 9 (I'm
hitting all the
fun "newer toolchain can't build older software with bugs like
multiple copies of the
same global variable symbol", issues, sigh) and I'll try to bisect
when this happened.



-adrian