Hi!

I recently installed NetBSD 1.4.2 on an old Mac IIci. To make
the machine a bit more useful I added an Ethernet card
(Asante MacCon 3 NuBus), a 235 MB hard disk and populated the
SIMM sockets with 8 1MB SIMMs.

I installed a minimal System 7.0.1 and the Booter on a 4 MB
partition, made a 16 MB swap partition and made a root
partition of the rest. I installed all sets except the ones
related to X.

After getting the system to boot and got Ethernet running
I installed a couple of precompiled packages (bash, lynx,
libslang, dt), FTP'd pkgsrc.tar.gz and untar'd it in /usr/pkgsrc.
Then I tried to compile some packages and started running
into trouble.

I have mostly tested compiling with addnerd
(pkgsrc/sysutils/addnerd/), and compilation has always
failed, but with different reasons.

After booting the machine, I log in as root and do
"cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/addnerd/; make". After some
time make segfaults, dies from signal 10 or 11, or
complains that the md5 checksum for addnerd-1.6.tar.gz
doesn't match. If I run make with NO_CHECKSUM=yes as
the error message suggests, it usually segfaults.
After trying to compile a couple of times, the machine
usually hangs and I have to pull the plug or press
the reset button.

I suspected that bad memory was the reason for the
problems, so I tried with a third set of four 1 MB
SIMMs and put them in in different configurations.
I would have tried with only 4 MB, but I can't get
enough free memory for the Booter to load the kernel
(around 200k missing, and no extensions etc. loaded).
Even with different SIMMs the symptoms seem to be the
same. It's possible that more than one SIMM is broken
but somehow I doubt it.

By doing "make&; top" I've checked that virtual
memory exhaustion should not be the problem. There's
always a minimum of around 14 MB of swap available.

Any ideas what I should try next?

-Osma

--
*** Osma Suominen *** ozone@iki.fi *** http://www.iki.fi/ozone/ ***