Subject: Re: Sysinst coredumps during floppy install
To: <>
From: David Laight <david@l8s.co.uk>
List: current-users
Date: 07/27/2003 17:35:27
On Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 08:40:08AM -0700, walt wrote:
> I see that someone else just reported the same problem in
> comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc and that there is already an open
> PR 20335.

I'm actually fairly sure this is the same as PR 17223.
I actually suspect there is a heap error somewhere :-(

> To recap, after successfully creating the new fs on the target
> hard disk, sysinst coredumps with a 'fs full' error when attempting
> to select the source for the installation 'sets'.

The 'fs full' message happens because there isn't enough space in the
ramdisk for the core dump.  It has nothing to do with the dump being
generated.

This is one of the problems that makes debugging this one mighty
tricky!

If you have a hard reproducible error, it is probably worth trying
hard to track this one down.  Unfortunately, all the evidence so far
seems to show that traversing a different route through sysinst causes
the error to go away.  No one has found the path that actually
makes it happen.  If it is an overwrite, knowing the text/data of the
overwrite might be enough to track it down.

> The filesystem which is 'full' is the ramdisk mounted as /
> and in my case was 2.3 megabytes in size with 2 megabytes used.
> This is on a desktop i386 with 512 megabytes of RAM, so there is
> no reason to make the ramdisk so small.

A whole 300k free is far more than it used to be!
Making it larger is slightly tedious, the space has to be allocated
when the kernel is built.  Fortunately the blocks of zeros compress
quite well and don't take up that much extra space on the floppies.

> I made the install floppies on my working 1.6U desktop machine
> which is current as of yesterday.

Does that mean that my new boot code actually works on a true floppy
install set?

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk