On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, John D. Baker wrote:

> I've been running the build.sh script and passing in "-j 4" for the
> maximum number of jobs to run.  This works up to a point, but after
> running for many hours just fine, the build process seems stuck and the
> load average drops to idle (as shown by xload).  As soon as I issue any
> command, or attempt to perform any action, the machine freezes and the
> load average begins increasing (as evidenced by the longer and longer
> cycles of the blinking power LED--I always build with the BLINK option
> for this reason).  The only way out is Stop-A and reboot from the OBP.
>
> I've noticed some other changes to sparc-specific files since my last
> update.  Maybe I got something incomplete and I should re-sync?

I've resync'ed and built a new kernel.  The frequency of the problem
decreased, but didn't go away.  It would still either become unresponsive
(except to 'ping') or spontaneously reboot.

I resync'ed again, and completely rebuilt everything in the kernel, but
this time with more conservative CPU optimization.  I.e. "-mcpu=v8" only.
This didn't help, alas.

But just by chance, I finally caught the machine in the act of
self-rebooting after a panic.  Unfortunately, I couldn't see the panic
message, just the backtrace, and that it couldn't write a core dump.
After it came back up there were no telltales I could see anywhere.

Might I now be running into kmem_map size issues on this machine (SS5-110
with 256MB)?  I've never had this machine panic for any reason before.
I'm now rebuilding the kernel with NKMEMPAGES_MAX doubled (3072), just
in case.  I might be able to cram a laptop somewhere in its vicinity to
log the serial console.

If I force the console to 'ttya' in the OBP, I expect NetBSD will respect
that setting when it comes up, even though I have a framebuffer and key-
board attached?  Any shortcuts to force the system console to 'ttya' in
spite of OBP settings and having a keyboard attached?

-- 
John D. Baker, KN5UKS                    NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
jdbaker(at)mylinuxisp(dot)com                 OpenBSD            FreeBSD
BSD -- It just sits there and _works_!