Some time ago, I was given a "Mercury" mainboard with CPU and 128MB
of SDRAM.  It identifies itself as a "KOB 630" (www.kobian.com) with
a VIA C3 1.0G Pro CPU, and SiS630 chipset (w/integrated video) and
whatever SiS IDE interface is among those supported by "siside".

I finally got around to setting the machine up and naturally I want
to have NetBSD on it.  I had recently built 4.0_BETA2 sets locally
on another machine, but not the install floppies, so I grabbed those
from a recent releng snapshot.

The install (via NFS) went OK, until it asked to set the root password,
set root's default shell, set "rc_configured=YES" in etc/rc.conf and 
mark
the wscons virtual terminals to "on".  In each case, the report was
"command ended on signal", but didn't say what the signal was.

I mounted the targetroot and the other filesystems manually.  I noticed
that there were core files for 'passwd', 'chpass', and 'sed' in the
targetroot.  I thought I would try chroot-ing to finish up manually, but
'sh' died with an Illegal Instruction error.

I fixed up the files manually using sed and rebooted the machine.

The bootstrap stages all ran and the GENERIC kernel loaded and ran up to
the point where it reported the boot device, root device and root file
system type.  Then it hung hard.

Rebooting the installer from floppy, I put a GENERIC_DIAGNOSTIC kernel
in place and rebooted.  All went as before, but then after the root
device and filesystem report, came an endless stream of "Process (pid 1)
got Signal 4".  As /usr/include/sys/signal.h confirmed, "SIGILL",
Illegal Instruction.

What's bizarre is that the ramdisk-based installer, the boot stages,
and the kernel all work fine, but it appears that any process loading
a program from the hard disk dies with "illegal instruction".  I should
run through the install again and save the core files to verify this
is the case for each.

And try to save a proper dmesg (or /kern/msgbuf since only the installer
gets far enough to be interactive).  Or reinstall with the 
serial-console
bootblocks and log it.  That will have to wait for this coming weekend
when next I have access to it.

The install sets I built work fine on the build host (P-II/266) and
other i386-class machines I have.  I'm not using any extra flags
anywhere, so the defaults should apply.

For what its worth, IBM PC-DOS 7.00 installs and runs just fine on the
VIA C3 machine.

Searching the mailing lists for VIA C3 turned up a few references to
illegal instruction, but none quite so egregious as what I'm 
experiencing.
Until I've gathered the usual data, does my description above suggest
anything to look for?

Thanks.

--
John D. Baker                            NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
http://mylinuxisp(dot)com/(tilde)jdbaker/     OpenBSD            FreeBSD
BSD.  It just sits there and _works_.
GPG fingerprint = D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4  BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645