>   I have a Tadpole SPARCbook 3GX which I have installed NetBSD 1.4.2 onto.
> I've got it installed and working nicely, and I've been looking into
> taking advantage of the new support in the -current kernels. I'm coming
> from a Debian/Linux and OpenBSD background, so I may not be doing things
> exactly the right way.

Okay; first item is that 1.4.2/sparc uses a.out for executables, but
-current uses ELF format (like Solaris, and also Linux/sparc IIRC).
It is fairly non-trivial to upgrade to ELF by rebuilding source.

Before attempting to build -current, upgrade to one of the binary snapshots.

The snapshot I recommend (because I built it and I know it works) is:
    ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sparc/snapshot/RETRACTED/19991223/
It is in the "RETRACTED" directory because there have been a couple more
snapshots since then. As I recall the only problems reported were against
the install floppies, so just point the 1.4.2 floppies at the snapshot sets.

19991223 was built on my 3GX and is still being run on it because I needed
it to be stable during the 1.4.2 cycle; there was also the problem that for
some reason, tctrl0 fails to initialize properly on my 3GX but worked fine
on the 3GX owned by the original author of tctrl0 (we checked by swapping
hard drive sleds and booting his kernels on my machine). Thus 19991223 has
a TADPOLE3GX file with tctrl0 commented out, just so you know.

>   My question for today is-- how do I create /dev/tctrl0? I'm used to in
> Linux the mknod command with Major and Minor device numbers, but this is
> NetBSD, and I do not know step 1 about creating devices. Would a simple
> MAKEDEV in the /dev directory take care of this for me? Or because I'm
> still running a 1.4.2 system (with a 1.4T kernel) will I need to take
> additional steps?

In theory `cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV tctrl0' would do it, unless there is a
bug in MAKEDEV (i.e. nobody added it to MAKEDEV yet).

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com