On Sunday 03 February 2002 1:59 pm, Dave Daniels wrote:
> I have just got RISC OS 4.27 working on my Kinetic RiscPC and
> am pleased to report that NetBSD still boots successfully with
> this version of RISC OS using the old bootloader. There are two
> caveats, though:
>
> 1) If you have two SIMM strips in your RiscPC in addition to the
>    Kinetic card, you will have to take one of them out. This is
>    because of the memory organisation under RISC OS 4.27. With
>    two SIMM strips, RISC OS now has five physical memory areas.
>    This is one too many for the bootloader and, more importantly,
>    for the NetNSD kernel. The problem is that the kernel is passed
>    a fixed sized table (four entries) by the bootloader for the
>    physical memory layout. There are now five entries in the table
>    so things don't quite work... NetBSD still boots but I found
>    that the screen was messed up. Everything is okay if you take
>    out one of the SIMM strips. (Actually, the physical memory is
>    different again: there are only *three* areas listed...)

Yep, that's a known issue.  Requires work on both ends IE the bootloader has 
to pass in more sections and the kernel has to make use of them.  Sounds like 
one of your simms just has 1 bank on it (I think)  try swapping the simms 
over see if it then reports 4 sections.

> 2) Not so important this one. When you reboot RISC OS, RISC OS
>    moans that the machine was not shut down cleanly.

Hmm, wonder how they do that?  Must be some flag in a file somewhere that's 
set on shutdown.

Chris