hasn't Michael L. Hitch said ? ...
> On Mar 10, 10:01am, Toru Nishimura wrote:
> > Just to report my case;
> > 
> > Although I don't have any PMAX other than several MAXINE (DS5000/25),
> > I have never experienced kernel troubles with stock NetBSD/pmax
> > (formal releases and snapshots) since NetBSD/1.1.
> > 
> > > Now I'm having another problem: Though it works generally, for some
> > > reason or another, my DECstation 3100 (KN01, Version 7.0, with two RZ55
> > > disks, CFB, 24M), crashes when it's doing something - anything,
> > > randomly.  It just sits there, frozen.  No panic message, no savecore
> > > dump.  I haven't been able to compile a kernel since it would crash in
> > > the middle somewhere and I'd have to restart compiling from the
> > > beginning (is this normal???  Do I have hardware trouble?)
> 
>   The 3100 has a complete different SCSI interface than the 5000 machines.
> It's quite possible that the SCSI driver for the 3100 may still have a
> bug or two.  It's been a while since I've worked on the 3100 SCSI driver,
> and I haven't used the 3100 much since then, so I'm not certain how well
> it works.  I've been using a 5000/25 for most of my development work
> (and hope to be able to move it to a 5000/50 before too long).
> 
>   If I get a chance, I can move my two RZ56 drives over to the 3100 and
> run with it a while to see if the driver still works.
> 
i had a very similar problem running OpenBSD/pmax on a 2100 (i first
thought that it was a OpenBSD specific problem - but now i have seen
several reports of such behaviour in this list so i think it's a
general *BSD/pmax problem - and OpenBSD/pmax has no real difference
from the hardware part to NetBSD/pmax) - the system runs for weeks if
idle - but if i put some disk activity onto it it hangs after a while
(from half an hour to more than a day) - without any panic messages or
something like - some time ago i switched from using both disks

  rz0 at sii0 drive 0 slave 0 FUJITSU M2624S-512 rev 0202,
    1015812 512 byte blocks
  rz3 at sii0 drive 3 slave 0 SEAGATE ST1480 rev 5830,
    832527 512 byte blocks

to only using the second one (the dec disk) and since then it runs
just fine - may be it's broken hardware - or the driver has problems
with multiple disks or with non dec disks - i just say this here
because maybe it can be useful for finding out the source of the
problem

hope that helps

t

p.s.: i think i also saw such a behaviour on my 5000/200 - it was then
      i added an 1 gb hitachi disk (then i also got sometimes lookups)
      but this disk is now dead - so it might have been due to broken
      hardware ...

-- 
  thomas graichen - graichen@rzpd.de graichen@OpenBSD.org graichen@FreeBSD.org

  perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when
      there is no longer anything to take away    antoine de saint-exupery