Hello,

first off, I admit I have bad hardware: 1st gen B&W G3, with the buggy
IDE chip.  I generally compile my kernel with

 wd*   at atabus? drive ? flags 0x0f00

which should disable UDMA and thus _should_ prevent errors during IDE
transfers.  (This means that I can't use GENERIC kernels)

I have 2 disks on the primary bus, out of disk space necessity.

However, the almost-generic kernel:
bash-3.2$ diff GENERIC VINYAMAR
29c29
< options       ALTIVEC         # Include AltiVec support
---
> #options      ALTIVEC         # Include AltiVec support
200c200
< config                netbsd  root on ? type ?
---
> config                netbsd  root on wd0a type ?
420c420
< wd*   at atabus? drive ? flags 0x0000
---
> wd*   at atabus? drive ? flags 0x0f00

appears to be less stable than 3.1 - I haven't been able to compile
userland 4.0 yet, from anoncvs updated with tag netbsd-4 about a week
ago.  The latest failure was:

trap: kernel write DSI trap @dd3006f4 by 0x32c924 (DSISR 0x42000000,
err=14), lr 0x32d070
panic: trap
stopped in pid 855,1 (du) at netbsd: cpu_debugger+0x10: lwz r0,r1,0x14

So this happened during a du so there was a fair bit of disk activity,
and commonly I notice that heavy disk activity can bring the machine
(or if I'm lucky, just individual tasks) down - even under 3.1, but
seemingly more so under 4.0.

Is there a way I can check if it is just my hardware?  Is it possible
to make a kernel that is more robust to these kind of IDE troubles?
At this pont, I'm considering replacing the machine (which is my
primary home server) with a boring i386 box - but that means trying to
find a cheap one that is reasonably quiet...

Joe.