On Fri, 29 May 98 12:19:59 EDT,
I-Jong Lin <ijonglin@EE.Princeton.EDU> wrote:

>     I'm starting to debug a cross-compiled kernel on my machine for
> turning on a particular accelerator.  Due to the cross-compilation
> and the accelerator and the speed of my NetBSD machine, it would be
> really hard to do a direct trace on the kernel.  So, is there any
> good way of figuring out how far the kernel has gotten along such as
> putting in code to beep or flash a light or something?  It's a
> pretty weird question, but all the changes I'm making are right as
> NetBSD starts up (+ cross-compile + accelerator stuff).  And when it
> freezes at the start, I'd like to know how far it actually got.

A long time ago, NetBSD/mac68k used to fill the screen by so-called
"gray bars" for exactly that purpose.  I'm sure the code is long gone,
but you can take the same approach.

There are two u_long variables videoaddr and videorowbytes that hold
the start address and the screen width in bytes, respectively.

If MMU is correctly set up, you should be able to fill a few rows at
once with a distinctive pixel pattern to show how much progress the
kernel is making.

Hope this helps,

Ken