Dear SPARCies,

Can you help me with a problem I am having with
NetBSD 1.2 on a 60 Mhz SparcStation 20 with 64Mbyte?

I pulled down the miniroot and source distribution
and used the NetBSD_1.2_ALPHA kernel to boot the
system. I built the GENERIC_SCSI3 kernel and booted
my new kernel. I then started to build the source
distribution for NetBSD 1.2 but kept having core dump
messages and transient compilation errors and system
PANIC crash dumps referring to pv_unlink.

Having scanned the archived mailing list for port-sparc
and found references to "options	NBUF=128" I tried
that. This made things rather worse as the boot hangs just
before the "Automatic reboot in progress" message after the
root mount. I tried "options	NBUF=809" and this gave me
a running system, although not a reliable one. When I tried
stripping out unwanted bits from my config file (bits not
needed for a sun4m) and ran that kernel it started PANIC
crash dumping again with pv_unlink errors during the boot
or soon after login.

It seems that NetBSD_1.2_ALPHA runs O.K. on my SS20, but
NetBSD_1.2 does not.

Is there a patch available for NetBSD_1.2 for the sun4m
architecture? Or something else I could try? Or do I need
to use NetBSD-current instead? I was trying to avoid
NetBSD-current because I wanted a solid system. Heigh-ho!

Cheers

Rob Goode	goode@nc3a.nato.int