Re: Re (6): installing NetBSD on a Sparcstation 2.

[Bill Roman <roman%songdog.eskimo.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 01:53 -0500, Dan Oglesby wrote:
> 
> The video on the CG6 framebuffer (SBus) appears to work for a few
> minutes after boot, then the console freezes.  I see no errors on the
> console, in dmesg (via SSH), or in /var/log/messages to indicate an
> issue with software.  I can SSH in to the box, and it appears to be
> running along just fine, minus the console issue.  After a Stop-A and
> a "boot disk", the system will fsck the filesystems, and have a
> working console again for a few minutes.

That sounds awfully like a problem I ran into with a CG6 on an SS5.
Look for the thread "NetBSD 5.0 and SPARCstation 5 not a lucky
combination" starting 2009-07-25.  Does it freeze when it scrolls more
than a line or two?

Can you ssh into the machine while it is frozen?  That would suggest the
problem is just the display freezing.

I experimented with a few minor changes in the CG6 code, and managed to
change the symptoms a little.  It looks like it's some sort of lack of
cooperation between threads, allowing one thread to start an operation
on the CG6 while another is waiting for one to finish.

The good news is that wscons does not appear to have a problem with the
CG6.