> Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 16:45:51 -0800 (PST)
> From: Curt Sampson <curt@portal.ca>

> On Thu, 25 Jan 1996, Christian Nygaard wrote:
> 
> > I've gotten so far that the NETBOOT program loads, but then the
> > machine hangs when initializing bootparamd protocol, its just standing
> > there showing its network address in HEX and requesting a address.
> 
> This is a problem with netboot on some (many?) machines. Unfortunately,
> gwr can't reproduce it on his, and nobody else has gotten around to
> tracking it down yet. I suggest you replace it with the sSunOS boot
> program from the Xkernel kit.

I scrounged up a Sun3/50 with PROM revision 2.6 and have finally been
able to reproduce the hang described above.  (I had an old 3/50 that
Adam sent me, but had to displace something to make room for it...)

The hang occurs when the netif_sun.c module calls the PROM open
routine.  The open would sometimes work, but often fail.  I tried
changing the resources passed to the PROM open and found that the
open routine in PROM version 2.6 appears to be sensitive to the
location of the DVMA buffer supplied to it.  When I use a "high",
page-aligned DVMA address, the PROM open routine works reliably.

I'll check-in these changes and put the latest netboot on
ftp.netbsd.org: /ftp/pub/NetBSD/arch/sun3/

Thanks to all who helped accurately characterize the problem.
Now let's see if we can make SCSI work on the old 3/50...

Gordon Ross