This is in reply to wojtek@3miasto.net's message.

Previous Correspondence, received at 17:47 17-4-01 +0200:
>> Not only panics occur (giving me the nice green debugger prompt),
>> at times the system just stups responsing; not even the numlock light
>> stays functional.
>> 
>> The only option is dumping core and rebooting. This brings out the
>> painful part: when fsck'ing the filesystems numerous "unexpected
>> inconsistencies" occur. Partially allocated inodes, files which have
>> to be deleted after their (partially allocated) inodes had to disappear.
>
>your hardware is broken. probably memory or PCI/disk controller. or check
>BIOS settings

That'd be rather strange, since testing with the same machine (and on
identical bios settings, etc.) with linux shows no such problems. It'd
seem to me that the support for my PCI chipset (VIA 585) fails a bit
under NetBSD. It's pretty similar to the problems I had with OpenBSD
only OpenBSD was far more unstable.

But let's assume it's in the BIOS. Which settings are likely to cause this?
I played around with	IDE Prefetch
			IDE Block mode

disablind the block mode made it work, only at a great loss of operating
speed for the system. Instead of fairly continuous operation, it runs in
bursts when transfering. This slows the xfer speed from 5M/s to 800k/s.
Fairly low for a cross-cable link, I'd say.

Is the above any useful info?


Greets,

	Rogier Krieger


-
"Eagles fly, but weasels don't get caught in jet engines..."