On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
It rotted once, didn't it?
Yes, but it was my understanding that it was a bit different kind of rotting :) I mean, it has rotten because nobody realized that inlining of FPU ops could break something - but it did. In the case of special build which differs only by the fact that it's built with -msoft-float, this shouldn't happen. Other kinds of rotting (non-FPU related) should affect 486 DX as well, no?
An operating system project like NetBSD gets many thousands of changes a year. Every once in a while, something bumps something unintentionally. Apparently part of what happened here, for instance, was a compile option got dropped during the a.out to ELF transition years ago. When things get knocked into, they break, and if nothing is making sure that they still work, they stop working.
Yes, I know, but putting this compile option back is the whole point of all this, right? As I wrote before, other kinds of rotting should affect 486DX as well (for which nobody wants to drop support, right?).
-current would be the real target here since that's what would get fixed for the SX. I presume it fails like 4.0 does -- we would want to figure out why.
Just tried, all the same, restart right after loading the kernel. I'm not sure it's 486SX specific - the machine in question is IBM PS/ValuePoint which I suspect could be the root of evil here. I could try with some more "normal" 486SX tomorow.
Vit Herman