> Trying to get my Mac IIx up to speed has proven more difficult to just 
> get to -current than either the i386 or hp300 ports lately.  My biggest 
> problem is apparently with the stability of the SCSI driver.

Hmmm...  What version of mac68k5380.c do you have?  The mac68k5380.c is
a machine-dependent part of ncr5380.c--which is #included at the bottom
of the file.  You should have at least version 1.14 of mac68k5380.c and
at least version 1.10.2.1 of ncr5380.c to be up with the latest
available sources.  Versions of mac68k5380.c between 1.11 and 1.13 had
several errors...  :-(

> So far, I've drawn a correlation between:
> 	panic: ffs_read 0  <-and->  extended heavy load (load avg > 4.0)

Hmm...   I haven't seen this...

> 	panic: bad dir  <-and->  any audio access of my CD-ROM.

... and I don't use a CD-ROM drive much under BSD.

> Neither one is particularly easy to reproduce, and in the latter case, I 
> can sometimes run for days before I get a crash so bad that I feel 
> fortunate that fsck can save enough of the filesystem for me to boot.

*sigh*  :-(

> I built a miniroot last night, just to prove to myself that it could be
> done, and then booted from it to see if I could get this Archive Viper 150
> to run.  No such luck.  After the (expected) "Can't set mode"  message
> from the kernel the first time I accessed the tape, I managed to get the
> system into a BRB state.

Hmmm....  This leads me to believe that you have earlier sources than
1.14 because I was able to use the tape--last time I tried--with this
driver (the earlier (scsi.c) driver would not handle tapes well at
all--usually wedging the scsi system irrecoverably).

> PS- Is there any hope of a miniroot-based installation that doesn't 
> depend on ethernet/SLIP (or PPP, for that matter)?  Well, come to think 
> of it, tape might already work... but I'm thinking more along the lines 
> of an HFS solution.

There's hope, but not in the next release.  I haven't touched it
for two weeks and the code is already frozen for the next
release--that's too big of a change to go in, now.  I'm hoping for
a miniroot installation from CD-ROM, ethernet, slip, ppp, tape, or
MacOS hard drive.  Perhaps even AppleShare over EtherTalk (with
the help of CAP--if it has an AppleTalk client package as well as
server).

-allen

-- 
Allen Briggs - end killing - allen.briggs@bev.net ** MacBSD == NetBSD/mac68k **
   Where does all my time go?  <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/">Guess.</a>