On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 12:25:27PM +0000, Christian Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Henry Nelson wrote:
> >Are others having success with running NetBSD 1.6 or above on IPCs?  I
> >have four of these, and recently attempted to update 3 of them to 1.6.
> >I could not install on one of them, whereas 1.5 installed and ran for
> >about a year no problem.  One of the two I got installed simply stopped
> >running after about two weeks.  The other one was running, but the
> >hard disk (old, but low use) gradually became very noisy, and obviously
> >sick, so I shut it down.  I have one other IPC running 1.4.3 that has
> >been running for about 4 years straight, so I'm wondering if I should
> >just install 1.5 and leave it at that.
> >
> >(BTW, no problem with 1.6 on two SS5s.)
> 
> 
> The early 1.6 releases exposed a bug in the sun4c MMU handling code, which
> had always been there but just not triggered. This mat be the source of
> your (non-disk related) problems.
> 
> AFAIK, 1.6.2 fixed this issue, as well as being fixed in 2.0.
> 
> See:
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc/2003/07/18/0002.html

Thanks for sending this URL.  I did read it, but had forgotten about it.
I remember now that that post was the reason I waited for 1.6.2 to come out.
That
  `` Other MMU resouce management related problems may still surface on these
     machines, such as the "all pmegs are gone" panic that has been reported
     several times already. ''
doesn't sound very encouraging, however.

What is "the VM system" mentioned in that post?  Maybe there is some way
to turn it off in the kernel?

henry nelson
 | day job: | http://yuba.kcn.ne.jp/biorec/nehan/henken.html