Re: SparcStation IPC: Data Access Exception

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> The other thing that sparc firmware is picky about is the block/frag sizes$
>> That's weird.  Do you have any idea what the mechanism for that is?  I thou$

That's strange.  It appears your UA unwrapped my text, despite my not
marking it as being rewrappable - you might want to fix that before it
mangles something where line breaks are more important.  (It would also
improve readability if you'd avoid paragraph-length lines for your own
text...and, for that matter, use a non-Windows-specific character
encoding.)

> Block size exceeds expected/allocated buffer size, perhaps?

Hm, that might be; if the booter tries to read things in fs_bsize-sized
chunks, rather than breaking large transfers up, it might upset
something.  32k is large enough to overflow a 16-bit signed value,
which might explain why you have seen trouble above bsize=16k.

> The other thing I?d try if the boot problem persists: zero the first part of$

That actually might be relevant.  At some point recent enough it hasn't
troubled me, I think NetBSD/sparc started paying attention to BSD
disklabels somewhere on the disk, overriding any Sun label.  If there's
a BSD disklabel there, a recent booter might be reading it, and _it_
might place the boot partition in, shall we say, an unhelpful place.

So blanking the first meg is actually a very sane idea.

> I?ve had this measure to ensure tabula rasa make the difference between inex$

I don't think I've needed it for SPARCs, but I also (a) generally don't
use post-1.4T on SPARCs and (b) don't usually use the NetBSD installer,
cloning an existing system instead (and the original poster may not be
willing or able to do either of those).

> Our lot in having to deal with the quirks and vagaries of extant system firm$

True enough...just look at all the issues Sun's ROM code has in various
versions: 1G cutoff (6-byte CDBs), 2G cutoff (signed 32-bit byte
offsets), 4G cutoff (unsigned 32-bit byte offsets)...and that's just
reading the disk.  TERM=sun-ss5 anyone? :-(

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