Subject: Lots of problems with 1.5 and hpcmips port
To: None <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
From: Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 02/20/2001 00:43:03
I've been running 1.5-release on my NEC MobilePro 780 for about 70 days now..
and have run into a few serious problems:

1) I cannot boot any kernel other than GENERIC.  Attempting to build a kernel
natively, and boot that kernel fails with "read program header table error"
from pbsdboot.   I have tried 3 different versions, and both gzipped and
not-gzipped kernels.  

2) I decided to try to download the new hpcboot.exe program off cvsweb last
saturday.  After uudecoding it and trying to run it.. I got the message from
WINCE that "this isn't a valid winCE binary" or some such, that someone else
had reported seeing with a WinCE 1.0 OS.  (my OS is 2.11)

3) The cursor keys are wrong on the NEC 780.  They are slightly misconfigured.  
Up is Right
Down is Up
Right is Down

4) There is a serious miscalibration of the pointer in X.  I recalibrated in
WinCE, and tested it, and my calibration was perfect..  However, in Xhpc,
towards the far left of the screen, the cursor is off by about 5-10 pixels to
the left.  Towards the right of the screen, it is off by about 3-5 pixels to
the right.  In the upper center of the screen, it is dead on.  The bottom and
top of the screen have the same problem, but only by about 3-4 pixels.. mostly
towards the bottom.

5) Not really a problem.. but a bit of a whine.. but none of the Fn-keys work..
like being able to to use the PgUp PgDn modes of the cursor keys with the Fn
key like under WinCE.

6) When the machine boots.. it spews a number of pcmcia irq 3 messages while
probing the disks and pcmcia cards.  During installation with sysinst it was
literally spewing them by the dozens.  During normal operations I never see
any however.

7) Just curious.. but is there/will there be any support for the scrolling
wheel device on the 780 in -current?

Worth noting however.. is that other than this.. the machine is pretty
impressive.. I've had a 54 day uptime, with lots of suspending, sometimes for a
week at a time.. and never lost time on the clock.  The machine is very quick
and responsive with the 1 gig microdrive I've got in there too.  I'm extremely
happy with this port, and this device.

---
Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
NetBSD supported hardware database: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/hw.cgi