Subject: State of sparc64 port on sun Netra computers (was: ifconfig doesn't work on 1.5.1 distribution miniroot)
To: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
From: Brian Buhrow <buhrow@lothlorien.nfbcal.org>
List: port-sparc64
Date: 07/18/2001 08:02:50
	Hello folks.  After a day of playing with netBSD-sparc64 and learning
more than I ever dreamed of how net booting works, I'd like to report on my
state of the world with respect to NetBSD and the Netra T1.  the machine
I've been using is a Netra T1 360MHZ Sparc III machine with 320MB of
memory.

1.  The ifconfig command on the miniroot for NetBSD-1.5.1 and the binary
snapshot dated 20010114 doesn't work, it displays all 0 addresses when it
displays the status of an interface.  I don't know if it actually sets the
interface correctly and merely displays it wrong, see below.

2.  The NetBSD-1.5 and 1.5.1 GENERIC kernels boot fine, recognize disk,
network, and everything, but fail to transfer data through the
hme0 network interface.  In order to assure myself that I wasn't being
bitten by problem 1 above, I arranged to have a copy of the ifconfig
command from the NetBSD-1.5.1 distribution on a disk in the machine so that
I could use it to manipulate the interface.  While it does show the correct
info and appears to configure the interface as requested, I am unable to
ping hosts, both on the local subnet and on remote subnets, nor am I able
to establish a tcp connection to another host, using ftp as the
establishing application.  As a last guess, I tried manually setting the
media type on the hme0 interface, in hopes that it was an auto-negotiation
error, but to no avail.
I also tried pinging the host from another machine, but got no answer.  No
error messages were generated, and the machine gave the impression that
the interface was fine.  

3.  The kernel from the 20010114 snapshot panics in inter_establish()
while trying to attach the com0 device.

4.  Mat Thomas's test kernel from the 13th of June seems to panic in
inter_establish() while attaching the semba device.  However, it's hard for
me to tell, since he's got quite a bit of debugging output going, and I
didn't have a typescript going.  Interestingly enough, I got it to write a
core image to disk, but it got stuck in a loop after it wrote the first
64MB, and then started over again.  It continued doing this until the
machine was power cycled.

	So, it seems that NetBSD/sparc64 isn't quite ready for prime time on any
of the Netra series of Sun computers.  Is there anyone other than Mat
working on making this work on either the X1 or T1 machines?

-thanks
-Brian