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Hello,

Hello,

> I have tested the SPARCbook kernel from 2005-07-15, and it seems to
> work, after a fashion.
>=20
> PCMCIA appears to work fine, my wlan card (PRISM2.5 chipset) works
> fine.

Nice :)

> I'm using a cross-compiled snapshot from 2005-07-14 sources, built
> on i386/2.0_STABLE

Hmm, my userland is older, but not much.

> I have some problems with it, however.
>=20
> - It lacks IPSEC (but GENERIC lacks that, too, I just happen to use
> it.)

Well, that's just a kernel config option.

> - The system is very unstable, where it was rock-solid running
> 2.0_STABLE
>   . during builds via nfs via WLAN it stops at different places with
>     different error codes. Sometimes signal 4, sometimes signal 10,
>     ...

This seems to be a generic problem - people with all kinds of sparc
hardware complained about processes dying seemingly at random.

>   . during booting, most of the times the ifconfig -l command fails,
>     the only time it did not fail was after a kernel panic, when it
>     had to do fsck during boot.

I get this too, but pretty rarely. About once in 100 reboots,
approximately. Here it works well enough to use a wlan card ( lucent
chipset ) as main network connection.

>   . sometimes it kernel-panicks, I haven't been able to copy down the
>     messages, something to do with caches ... (Was something in the
>     handling of the TurboSPARC CPU changed after 2.0? If it was mainly
>     tested on a 3GX, the main difference to my 3TX is the
>     microSPARC-II vs. TurboSPARC CPU.)

That would be helpful - I didn't see a kernel panic that wasn't related
to me hacking something for ages. As far as I know the only difference
between the 3GX and the 3TX is the CPU ( and therefore L2 cache ).
Did older SPARCBOOK kernels work better? Maybe it's the CPU power saving
stuff, I'm not sure it's doing The Right Thing(tm) for TurboSPARC CPUs.

> - I can't seem to get the Xserver to run, it aborts with a bus error
>   before opening the display.

Which one? Xsun won't work with the SPARCBOOK kernels, mainly because
the display driver doesn't try to emulate a cg3 anymore. The XFree86
stuff from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/macallan/sparc/
should work.

> Is any particular snapshot on releng.netbsd.org recommended for
> use with these kernels?

Try the userland from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/macallan/sparc/sets/ - works
tolerably well here. No idea about releng snapshots, I always built my
own ( mainly for -mcpu=3Dv8 )

have fun
Michael

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