Hi,

We are running three Soekris boards (4501, 4521) under NetBSD (1.6.1 for
now).  We see three problems at the moment:

1. The boot delay (5-sec countdown before kernel load) does not work.
   Soekris proceeds to load the kernel immediately, so we can't change
   the name of the kernel that is loaded.

2. Serial ports "duplicate" outgoing characters every now and then.  When
   a character is duplicated, the previous character is lost.  Example:

   kbc selftsst: ffffffff

3. Ethernet problems.  Both at 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps, it seems that received
   packets are lost, which causes TCP retransmissions and short delays in
   interactive shell use (and file transfer).  I'm seeing these ín syslog:

   May  8 12:42:41 gwj /netbsd: sip1: CRC error
   May  8 12:42:42 gwj last message repeated 4 times
   May  8 12:42:42 gwj /netbsd: sip1: frame alignment error
   May  8 12:42:42 gwj /netbsd: sip1: frame alignment error
   May  8 12:42:43 gwj /netbsd: sip1: CRC error
   May  8 12:42:43 gwj /netbsd: sip1: frame alignment error
   May  8 12:42:43 gwj last message repeated 2 times
   May  8 12:42:43 gwj /netbsd: sip0: frame alignment error

We have also noticed that Kingston CompactFLASH cards do not work very 
well with Soekris: After a warm reboot, the BIOS fails to boot up from
the CF.  This is not a NetBSD problem because it occurs even when NetBSD
is not booted.  A hardware reset is required to get the board running
again (which is why we built an external watchdog which hw resets the
Soekris when necessary).

The Kingston CF cards failed to boot completely until we changed the
NetBSD bootloader to read only one sector at a time off the CF.  Some
other cards did not have this problem.  Both cards report that only
one sector can be read/written per command and both cards work OK
under NetBSD, so I don't know why the original bootloader didn't work
with the Kingston card.

BTW, we have a simple driver for NetBSD 1.6 which can control the GPIO
signals of the Soekris boards.  We use it to strobe the external watchdog
and reset external systems.

  -jm