Hello,

> > > IRQs below 23 and all the PCI slots fire fine and consistently. Sliding
> > > the mouse around fires the IRQ for that USB card slot. The bm
> > > definitely seems to be misbehaving though. It's IRQ's seem to fire for
> > > bursts up to about 100 per second, then drop to 0 for a second, then
> > > burst back and none.
> > That's certainly odd. I assume the others continue firing when bm takes
> > its break?
> 
> Yep, nothing else seems to be jerking around, though I have not done
> anything seriously stressful yet, just basic desktop stuff.
Weird. I had something like that for a while with an IRQ shared between an audio card and a bunch of USB controllers, couldn't find an explanation (let alone a fix) so far - I wonder if it's the same thing, although for me it's apparently random and pretty rare with the latest extintr.c

> > > Is XFree86 supposed to work on the built in Rage IIc+ chip?
> > Depend. In theory - yes. In real life - maybe, Riccardo got his 4400 to work but apparently X gets the amount of video RAM wrong
> > and uses only 1MB or so.
> 
> Should be the same exact chip if I remember the 4400 motherboard right,
> just a different version. It's a Mach264 GT according to the chip label I
> think. Mine has 6 MB of VRAM.
/should/ work then.

> > > There  doesn't seem to be an ati driver loading for it. If I switch from vga
> > > to ati the logs say it loads rage128 and radeon but I didn't see any
> > > Rage Pro chips listed and the X server bails.
> > What exactly does it say? Any complains about memory mapping around 0xa0000?
> 
> ...
> (--) PCI:*(0:18:0) ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage I/II 215GT [Mach64 GT] rev
> 154,Mem @ 0x82000000/24, I/O @ 0x2000/8
> ...
> (II) ATI: ATI driver (version 6.5.6) for chipsets: ati, ativga
> (II) R128: Driver for ATI Rage 128 chipsets:
> ...
> (II) RADEON: Driver for ATI Radeon chipsets: ATI Radeon QD (AGP),
> ...
> (II) Primary Device is: PCI 00:12:0
> (II) ATI:  Candidate "Device" section "Card0".
> (WW) ATI:  PCI/AGP Mach64 in slot 0:18:0 could not be detected!
> (EE) No devices detected.
> 
> Fatal server error:
> no screens found
> 
> Thats odd, how is primary device 00:12:0 and the card at 0:18:0? I can
> post the full XFree log and config somewhere if you want it.
I guess one is decimal, the other is hex, 0x12 == 18
Riccardo used a patched kernel and a patched Xserver when getting X to work, I don't know if his 4400 really needed that though, if it did X should not work for him with any other kernel. One thing is different - your ATI chip hangs on an ordinary host bridge, in the 4400 it has its own PCI bus, but that shouldn't change things. 
If you feel adventurous please try this Xserver:
http://macallan.homeunix.org:6704/stuff/BSD/XFree86_server_macppc.tar.bz2 and one of my kernels ( whichever works for you, they should all have the necessary ofb hack ) ?
As usual: prepare for the worst, don't use a monitor that can be killed by odd video timings, I can't guarantee for anything - it works for me though. And it has never been tested on a Grackle, there may be weirdnesses.

> > > (freeze)
> > > I can't drop into ddb even. So back to the old kernel from Dec 13th.
> > Does it also hang at this point with the USB drive disconnected? Sometimes I get hangups with a misbehaving (read: or not
> > properly quirk-supported ) USB device connected.
> 
> Yes, it hangs with no usb devices connected at all after waiting for SCSI
> devices to settle.
Hrm. On which kernel does this happen? You said some of them work for you.

> Also, what are the serial TTY's supposed to be called?
Should be tty00 and tty01

> When I fire up the
> dec 13th kernel, I can't log into tty00, it says root login not allowed on
> this console even though it's set to secure. If I turn it off and add
> ttyZ0, it works, but only if I'm on a serial console. If I boot graphical
> head, getty never starts and shows up on the serial line. Same kernel,
> weird.
I've never been able to even get a login prompt ( although I didn't try very hard ) - only transferred a lot of stuff using minicom/zmodem.

have fun
Michael