Hi,

I spent a bit of time Saturday and Sunday on the problem with
crashing with the softfloat install kernels.  Sadly I didn't
come to a conclusion.  The version I worked with was from  
the tar files from 25 Dec and a verison built on a ppc is at:

ftp://ftp.ziaspace.com/pub/NetBSD/m68k/current/

I was using a version built on i386 but this shouldn't make
a difference, right:-)

What I found was that there are two places on my pb540s where
one can pretty consistantly crash things.

- During the configure step where all of the devices are configured.
- During the init step in the if_sn.c code.

Basically if the ethernet was quiet then things seemed ok.
If, otoh, the ethernet was active during the device messages
as they are configured or when the sn device was inited with

ifconfig sn0 192.168.1.4

then we crashed in the install kernel.  It seems ok in the 
generic kernel.

It looks like it could be allocation of the recieve buffers.  There
are comments in if_sn.c that imply that the sn device is special
since it has static bufferes.  Does anyone know about this
and/or know if changes have been made that might affect this?

I went through and looked at recently changed files and then
compared them to 2.0 which seems rock solid and I don't see 
changes which should make a difference.  My guess is that
something in some non system specific file changed in a way 
that the sn driver file didn't mimic.  Maybe the buffers aren't
allocated at the right time and if we get a packet before they 
are properly allocated with the INSTALL kernels something
important is overwritten but  for the GENERIC kernels nothing
important is overwritten?  Got me...

Could others try this build?  Also could folks with other ethernet
interfaces try as well?  It would be nice to track this down. 

cheers

bruce