Quoting Pierre Letouzey <Pierre.Letouzey@pps.jussieu.fr>:

>
> Hi all (again :-)

Hi again, Pierre.

> Last mail of my group of 3. More details about what I'm doing in the
> first one (the one about a kernel freeze).  The last issue I've
> encountered with playing with these two indigos 1 and 2 concerns the
> indigo 2 (IP22) and netbsd 3.1-RC4: I systematically get a freeze
> during the init phase of the boot, at locations that may vary from one
> attempt to the other. Most of the time, after "Mounting all
> filesystems", a single "O" appears on the following line and nothing
> more. Another time I've reached the sshd launch, and try to ssh the
> netbsd box and get a "passwd:" prompt, but nothing more happens when I
> type my passwd.  A third time, I've seen the end of the rc phase
> (prompt of a second date), and a lonely "N" appears (the "N" of NetBSD
> above the login prompt ?). After a freeze, machine answers to ping,
> but not to ssh.

I cannot offer any advice on this problem, as I've never encountered  
it myself. Perhaps others will be able to give you a better place to  
start. However, I would recommend trying to run a more recent version  
of NetBSD. A fair bit may have changed since the 3.x stable branch,  
and most of the people who actually use NetBSD/sgimips are probably  
running something closer to -current.

> Kernel used is the GENERIC one (ecoff flavour). In comparison, Netbsd
> 3.0.1 is working smoothly on this machine.

This is an interesting data point. Could you kindly try -current and  
see if that works?

The following link has some more recent builds of the latest and greatest:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/

You can probably get by with just grabbing one of those kernels. An  
older userland should be mostly okay.

> PPS: ... and I almost forgot to thank you all for the great job of
> supporting such original hardware in a free way. My reports are only
> there to help improving things. Cheers

I hope you are not disappointed, but as there is only very little  
interest in these machines, our ability to help and provide a stable  
platform may prove... suboptimal.

Take care,
Steve