Re: Eurotech/SphereII port of NetBSD5/evbarm

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I've been working on porting NetBSD 5.0 to the Eurotech/SphereII
> board, which uses a Cirrus Logic EP9315 ARM920TDMI processor: [...]

> [...] the same results - that only the first 17 characters are
> printed to console and then userland does not continue.

Userland does not continue, or userland does not produce any further
output?  There's a critical difference between the two, and it's easy
to confuse them.

My furst guess would be that the problem is in the serial driver when
running off interrupts (as opposed to polled-mode console output), and
it's got a 16- or 17-byte FIFO: output gets stuffed into the FIFO until
it's full, but the interrupt that would normally provoke reloading more
data when the FIFO drains isn't working right.  If this guess is right,
the rest of the data is in the output queue and will get prinetd if
something calls the interrupt handler.

> As mentioned on the website, the kernel continues to run!  Output is
> correctly shown when plugging in and out USB devices (for example).

As a test, perhaps, call the serial-line interrupt handler from the USB
hot-plug code, and see if adding a USB device produces the next 16 or
17 bytes of output?

As another possible test, boot single-user and blind-type RETURN to get
sh and then /sbin/halt to halt the system?  If it then halts, you know
userland is running, just not getting its output out.

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