My two i386 systems (a 486 and a PPro) each seem to be having
problems under -current, I was wondering if anybody has seen anything
similar and maybe have any suggestions (or at least know that these
problems exist).  Both systems are using the same -current kernel,
compiled yesterday from a sup the night before.


    My PPro has an NCR 53c810a.  If I try to cold boot off my new
kernel, I get a repeated message (I believe it's "error code 0") several
times on each of my SCSI devices, and the kernel can't find a root device
to mount.  If I reboot and do a (single-user) boot with a kernel
sup'ed/built 9/7, this kernel boots fine, and after that I can boot my
new kernel.  Further warm boots work just fine, but cold boots always fail on
the new kernel (booting to DOS/Win95 first doesn't seem to help either).
 FWIW my 486 has a 53c810, and does not seem to have this problem.

    Each of my machines also has a floppy drive (different makes).  Both
drives seem to work just fine in the PPro, I can read and write disks
just fine.  In the 486 however, either drive seems to function (i.e.
disks are not corrupted, reads are correct) but gives random timeouts,
and many "soft errors" on reads or writes.  In general, doing any kind
of disk access on the 486 tends to generate screenfulls of kernel
messages.  The drives seem to work fine under DOS/Win95 on the 486.

    Other than these problems, NetBSD/i386 seems to be pretty happy on
my systems.  I'm having several problems with SUP, where it isn't
deleting files that disappear on the server, and not updating other
files when they get updated on the server, but with some manual
poking/ftping in the src directory I've at least gotten everything to
build.


    I also have a random question.  I see within arch/i386/stand there
is a netboot directory, that I presume is used to build boot ROMs for
ethernet cards that support such a thing.  What I'm wondering is if
there is a cross between dosboot.com and the netboot, that would let you
fetch a remote kernel and boot from DOS.  I realize that with
dosboot.com and a kernel on the DOS fs I can boot from DOS, but I'd
rather have it grab a kernel from my server than have to remember to
copy my latest to my MSDOS partition.  Has anybody done anything like
this?  Can netboot be easily modified to do this (ideally I guess it
would mean supporting my ethernet card from DOS, FWIW I have a DE435
(Tulip) card)

                                                          Will Ferry



                                                          Will Ferry