Re: NetBSD/hpcmips userland crashes (Re: IBM Workpad z50 dmesg collection)

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2023 at 06:15, B 9 <hackerb9%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 4:31 AM David Brownlee abs%absd.org@localhost wrote:
>>
>>
>> We (mainly Alex) are trying to track down when the issue started by
>> starting with a netbsd-7 install and then testing different kernels
>> built from source between netbsd-7 and netbsd-8.
>
> Where did you get the NetBSD 7 install? The earliest one I see on NetBSD.org is 8.0.

There should be a pretty complete list at
http://archive.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/ (which could be better
signposted)

> I was able to get a filesystem formatted on wd0a using sysinst 9.3 (and a lot of persistence), but I wasn’t able to download base or any other sets, so I just copied over sysinst’s root to wd0a. I tried using /bin/sh as /sbin/init, but that causes a kernel panic. (panic: init died (signal 0, exit 0)). It’s been a while since I used NetBSD, but shouldn’t that work?
>
> I'm also running into some issue with, I believe, power management. Shortly after booting, I’ll see some message flash up on the screen and before I have a chance to read it, the screen will turn off. This is happening with the 9.3 kernel as well as the kernel from 2013-01-01. The power button does not wake it up and I have to reset the machine all the way back to WinCE. Any idea how to disable APM (and/or screensavers) at boot time?

At this point I think there is a fundamental (caching?) (VM?) issue
affecting some mips devices introduced between netbsd-7 and netbsd-8,
so on those devices pretty much any version after that is going to
behave badly. There may well be other issues on some devices, but they
behaviour will be conflated with that initial issue, so it probably
makes sense to try to track it  down first

David