> Ho hum..

La... te dah.....
 
> About a year ago I started moving drivers used by the sparc port
> towards the bus_space(9) and bus_dma(9) model. This was done in
> a number of steps. It was clear that several drivers would be needing
> actual testing after the surgery applied to them. I'm relying
> on "-current" users who occasionally build new kernels and see if
> those still function with their hardware.
> 
> Obviously, this has not been the case for several drivers (mostly for
> aging devices on sun4 systems), as evidenced by bugs that I found
> in the last few days in the `si' and `ie' drivers which have made
> those devices non-functional in -current for nearly a year.

Yeah, I have bad karma coming from the si drivers in my old sun4.
I get si_dma_start errors constantly under load, but none on light
load.  Sounds like a minor timing thing.

> This raises the question whether we can sanely continue to claim to
> have support for this hardware in the upcoming 1.4 release. Unless
> it can be demonstrated that a device on the `supported list' can
> be succesfully driven by a -current/1.4-branch kernel, the answer
> is going to be "no", I guess...

Since I am the oddball out with the aging sun4 and sun3 hardware
(I do have an aging ss1 that I would also like to get up to speed,
but it dies harshly with a missing init from netbsd-rd tapeboot, and
dies harshly from miniroot for some reason on the latest shapshot I
found in the arch tree).  On the older hardware, is there a specific
1.3.X or snapshot that I should be using to get the machines up the
first time?  The last snapshot basically would not on my hardware.

But, for the record, I would like to see, if possible, 1.4 support
for things of aging dinosaur sparc class, like my old ss1, and sun4.
I would be willing to do some minor porting and machine testing, IFF
I can get it up on the machines, stably enough, the first time.
My 3/80 machine is finally up, and I am looking to run the sun4 back
up again, once I roll off some sunos tarballs, using the 3/80 as the
ftp archive source box.

For a most likely to work sun4 suite, which exact release/snapshot
should I start with?

Thanks

Bob Keys