On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, George Harvey wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:27:06 +0100 (BST)
> David Brownlee <abs@NetBSD.org> wrote:
>
>>  	So, what are people doing with their pmaxen, and is anyone
>>  	planning on testing the NetBSD 4.0RC3 build which should be
>>  	up at ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-4.0_RC3/ later
>>  	today? :)
>
> I've just installed 4.0_RC2 on my 5000/133 as an upgrade to 3.1. The
> upgrade procedure completed without any errors but the stage where
> postinstall goes round deleting obsolete files was very slow. I left it
> running overnight and from a look at the timestamps today, it must have
> taken more than 3 hours! Postinstall displayed some messages about
> things that needed manually fixing when it finished but they disappeared
> when the upgrade process moved on the the next tarball, do the
> postinstall messages get logged to disk anywhere?

 	You can run 'postinstall' manually to get options on how to run
 	it (it needs a source tree or distribution "etc.tgz" file).
 	'postinstall -s .../etc.tgz check' will report all the issues
 	it finds

> On rebooting into 4.0_RC2, I get 4 error messages:
>  wsconscfg: WSDISPLAYIO_ADDSCREEN: Cannot allocate memory
> but they don't stop the machine booting and I can login on the console

 	Hmm, pmax in NetBSD 4 is using the MI console display wscons(4),
 	so it looks like wsconscfg is trying to setup the multiple
 	virtual text consoles, but failing (it may be that that
 	specific feature of wscons has not been added to pmax).
 	Is this a framebuffer or serial console?

> as normal. All my Turbochannel cards are recognised (PMAGB-B, PMAD-A,
> DEFTA-AA) but I haven't checked if the PMAD and DEFTA work yet. I'm
> expecting GCC 4 to be slow so I'm running a test at the moment to see
> how it compares with GCC 3 on 3.1.

 	Short answer, uses significantly more CPU and memory to compile,
 	produces very slightly better code :/ Its a fine tradeoff if you
 	have a fast box or can crosscompile from one, but less fun if you
 	need to natively compile on a slow machine :(

 	Compiler aside it would be interesting to see how the machine
 	compares to NetBSD 3 in terms of performance and stability.
 	the problem is that would involve having a NetBSD 3 and NetBSD 4
 	installs available and switching between them to run something
 	like ttcp, bonnie, and apachebench... (and plenty of time :)

-- 
 		David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --