Subject: -current crashing
To: None <port-sparc64@netbsd.org>
From: Arto Huusko <arto.huusko@utu.fi>
List: port-sparc64
Date: 10/15/2004 23:53:46
Hello,

I finally got around to installing NetBSD (2.99.9) to my Ultra 5, which had
been just gathering dust for a few months after I bought it.

The installation finished OK, and it went through very easily. I installed
by netbooting from an i386 host.

After installation the machine booted from the hard drive OK and I started
fiddling around with settings. Then, at some point, the machine just
crashed (IIRC, panic message was "memory address not aligned"). And after
that, it would not boot from hard drive anymore: almost immediate crash
after it got in kernel (in strlcpy, called IIRC from main()). And neither
would it boot from network either.

Anyway, I have no idea what I did, but suddenly it booted again from
hard drive. After fsck it crashed again, but after saying reset and
boot again, it booted all the way to prompt (going through sshd
setup etc.)

After that, it worked OK for quite a while again. But as I started
building pkgs from pkgsrc, it crashed again with "memory address not
aligned".


Because the system seems quite flaky, I'm wondering what is the problem.
I've read that the problem can often be too old openboot.
I have version 3.19 -- is that something I should update? Or could the
problem be broken memory? Anyway, judging by the traffic on the mailing
list, NetBSD should perform better than this, so I'm thinking the
problem is something else.