On Jan 26,  2:17am, Dave Tyson wrote:
}
} Under 1.5.x if you use 'less /kern/msgbuf' to view kernel messages
} everything works OK and after a few pages of ^@ null characters the
} text is displayed. If you try the same thing under 1.6 or current I
} find that you get the same pages of ^@ null characters and nothing
} else. Doing a 'cat /kern/msgbuf|less' provides a workaround, but it
} would be nice if the original behaviour could be restored. A quick test
} with the 1.5.3 less under current shows the problems still exists and
} points to a change in the behavior of /kern filesystem. Anyone else seen
} (annoyed?) by this. Is it worth a PR?

     Yes, I noticed this when I booted a custom made CD on my Sun Ultra
1.  At the time, I wrote it off as an odd quirk of NetBSD/sparc64 or
something related to my install CD.   Now that you're having problems
on i386, it sounds like this is a generic problem with 1.6.

     I'm adding netbsd-users, since this isn't just an i386 problem.

} 
} Dave
} 
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} 
}-- End of excerpt from Dave Tyson