I've got a sparc classic with 48 MB of RAM, an FSBE/S, two disks (both on
the internal controller; I don't entirely trust the driver just yet) and a
Sony CD-ROM drive on it. I intend for this system to replace my poor old
Sun 4/330 that runs SunOS 4.1.4 in production (which has an intermittently
bad SIMM; that's what has been giving me "data fault" panics on that beast
lately).

When I run 1.2, the classic is stable (though the FSBE/S doesn't work).
However, every time I've tried -current so far, I've had odd troubles,
mostly with bad data showing up in files, sometimes consistently, sometimes
transient. This leads to compiles that go bang with trash input, or even
the compiler (or the loader) itself dying oddly (SIGSEGV).

I wish I could put my finger on the instability. It smells like some kind
of cache, vm or disk driver problem (maybe the -current disk driver hates
my old 2G Seagate disk?). I just FTP'd down that netstat-curses thing to
try, and cc1 died with a SIGILL when I tried "make". I'm almost tempted to
run "tripwire" on the source tree.

Is there a late model snapshot hiding somewhere non-obvious (the last one
on ftp.netbsd.org is dated December 10) that appears stable on this
platform (or that long fabled "patch" to 1.2)? Or am I the only one playing
with classics & LXs? (personally, I like them because they're physically
small - that lunchbox form factor is useful for machines you intend to put
in a closet somewhere, and they're getting quite cheap...).

Reports of similar woe (or happiness!) from other classic or LX users on
-current would be appreciated. I'm trying to figure out if I'm going mad or
whether this is something in the software (me, I was always told to suspect
my code first, and the hardware second).

	thanks,

	Erik


Here is the dmesg from the most recent GENERIC kernel (yesterday's sup,
compiled from scratch under 1.2 kernel, so it should be good...):

NetBSD 1.2C (GENERIC) #2: Wed Feb 26 23:21:43 PST 1997

fair@atomic.clock.org:/home/netbsd/current/src/sys/arch/sparc/compile/GENERIC
re
al mem = 49889280
avail mem = 44765184
using 128 buffers containing 2494464 bytes of memory
bootpath:
/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@4,8400000/esp@4,8800000/sd@2,0
mainbus0 (root): SUNW,SPARCclassic
cpu0 at mainbus0: TI,TMS390S10 @ 50 MHz, on-chip FPU
cpu0: physical 4K instruction (32 b/l), 2K data (16 b/l) cache enabled
obio0 at mainbus0
clock0 at obio0 addr 0x71200000: mk48t08 (eeprom)
timer0 at obio0 addr 0x71d00000 delay constant 23
zs0 at obio0 addr 0x71100000 pri 12, softpri 6
zs0a: console i/o
zs1 at obio0 addr 0x71000000 pri 12, softpri 6
[slavioconfig at obio0] addr 0x71800000 not configured
auxreg0 at obio0 addr 0x71900000
power0 at obio0 addr 0x71910000
fdc0 at obio0 addr 0x71400000 pri 11, softpri 4: chip 82077
iommu0 at mainbus0 addr 0x10000000: version 1/4, page-size 4096, range 64MB
sbus0 at iommu0: clock = 25 MHz
dma0 at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0x8400000: rev 2
esp0 at dma0 slot 0x4 offset 0x8800000 pri 4: ESP200 40Mhz, target 7
scsibus0 at esp0: 8 targets
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 0: <SEAGATE, ST42100, 7614> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd0: 1813MB, 2574 cyl, 15 head, 96 sec, 512 bytes/sec
sd1 at scsibus0 targ 3 lun 0: <CONNER, CP30200  SUN0207, 4544> SCSI2
0/direct fixed
sd1: 203MB, 2123 cyl, 4 head, 49 sec, 512 bytes/sec
audio0 at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0x1300000 pri 13, softpri 4
SUNW,bpp at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0xc800000 not configured
ledma0 at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0x8400010: rev 2
le0 at ledma0 slot 0x4 offset 0x8c00000 pri 6: address 08:00:20:04:d3:67
le0: 8 receive buffers, 2 transmit buffers
dma1 at sbus0 slot 1 offset 0x81000: rev esc
esp1 at dma1 slot 0x1 offset 0x80000 pri 5: ESP200 40Mhz, target 7
scsibus1 at esp1: 8 targets
cd0 at scsibus1 targ 6 lun 0: <SONY, CD-ROM CDU-8003A, 1.9a> SCSI2 5/cdrom
removable
lebuffer0 at sbus0 slot 1 offset 0x40000
le1 at lebuffer0 slot 0x1 offset 0x60000 pri 7: address 08:00:20:04:d3:67
le1: 64 receive buffers, 16 transmit buffers
cgthree0 at sbus0 slot 3 offset 0x0: SUNW,501-1718, 1152 x 900
root on sd0a swap on sd0b
root file system type: ffs