On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 12:50:30PM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We are running three Soekris boards (4501, 4521) under NetBSD (1.6.1 for
> now).  We see three problems at the moment:
> 
> 1. The boot delay (5-sec countdown before kernel load) does not work.
>    Soekris proceeds to load the kernel immediately, so we can't change
>    the name of the kernel that is loaded.

As a workaround you can hit space several times starting when you see the
5 second countdown to enter the monitor.

> 2. Serial ports "duplicate" outgoing characters every now and then.  When
>    a character is duplicated, the previous character is lost.  Example:
> 
>    kbc selftsst: ffffffff

I have never noticed this problem.  I have the latest BIOS and I am running
-current.  So it might be a 1.6.1 issue.  Oh, I am running at 9600bps also.

> 3. Ethernet problems.  Both at 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps, it seems that received
>    packets are lost, which causes TCP retransmissions and short delays in
>    interactive shell use (and file transfer).  I'm seeing these ?n syslog:

My ethernet works great.  This may be a result of the "short cable" patch
that wasn't committed until recently.  I don't believe it made it to 1.6.1.
You can use cvsweb to diff 1.77 and 1.78 of if_sip.c.

> We have also noticed that Kingston CompactFLASH cards do not work very 
> well with Soekris: After a warm reboot, the BIOS fails to boot up from
> the CF.  This is not a NetBSD problem because it occurs even when NetBSD
> is not booted.  A hardware reset is required to get the board running
> again (which is why we built an external watchdog which hw resets the
> Soekris when necessary).

Get rid of the card. :)  My 'SunDisk SDCFB-16' works fine.  I can't remember
if I tested my 64MB and 128MB cards.  My 16MB card is a bit tight on space
so I might be using one of the larger ones before too long.

> BTW, we have a simple driver for NetBSD 1.6 which can control the GPIO
> signals of the Soekris boards.  We use it to strobe the external watchdog
> and reset external systems.

Sounds cool.  Are you willing to send-pr it?

-Andrew