Re: 5.0RC2 and negative runtime

["Michael L. Hitch" <mhitch%lightning.msu.montana.edu@localhost>]

On Thu, 26 Mar 2009, tponsford wrote:

> WARNING: negative runtime; monotonic clock has gone backwards
>
> it then went away, but appeared again on the Vax4000-60. The TOY clocks 
> checked out OK and it appears not to have affected anything..so far, but is 
> it a bug, bad hardware?

  I think this is due to a bug in the timecounter changes to the vax.  I 
believe the interval count register only counts from -10000 to 0, but the 
timecounter configuration has the counter_mask set up to use all 32 bits.
This has been changed in -current, but apparently I did not request a 
pullup for the netbsd-5 branch.

  I think the 4000-60 uses a different counter register, so I'm not sure 
why you would see it there.

  In addition, changing the counter_mask to mask the appropriate bits 
appears to make the interval count register no longer valid for 
timecounters, so it actually is not used.  I haven't figured out if 
there's any way around this yet.

> Also it appears that there was no Xserver,ie., no Xorg,Xdec,or Xwhatever 
> binary in the Xserver set. I was hoping to try the SPX driver on the graphic 
> framebuffer, but it was MIA. Does the X/SPX driver need to be compiled out of 
> the Xorg pkgs?

  I don't believe the vax has ever built an X server.  I've done some 
changes to the XdecNetBSD server to recognize the lcg driver Blaze Atonic 
did, and may have modified it for the spx driver.  The 4000-90 has 
problems when using the graphics console (it fails to configure the dz 
device and thus has no keyboard or mouse).  I used to have things running 
on the 4000-vlc, but I don't know if it still works or not.  The last time 
I tried to get my 4000-90 to work with the graphics console, I couldn't 
get it to configure the devices correctly.

> I also got the dreaded chicken and egg problem when trying to compile a 
> package out of pkgsrc. I get the "Circular dependency detected" as it 
> searches for gcc-2.95, but gcc-4.1.3 is installed. I thought 4.1.3 was 
> generating good vax code, but do I need to install 2.95.? This is from the 
> latest version of pkgsrc (03-2009)

  There are some packages that won't work with newer versions of gcc and 
require specific versions of gcc.  It looks like there are actually quite 
a few of them, wanting 2.95 2.95.3, 3.0, 3.0.5, or 3.4.  I wouldn't know 
how well any of these would do on the vax.

> I understand that 5.0 is self-hosting now. While I wasn't going to rebuild 
> the whole system, It would be good if it could. I don't really want to start 
> cross-compiling unless it's necessary, or the package is too big.

  5.0 should be mostly self-hosting.  There's a problem with a couple of 
tools that will cause the build to fail.  The failure leaves a partial 
file, which will allow the build to continue until the next failure. 
After several restarts of the build, it should eventually complete.

  I've not tried very many packages, so I don't know how well 5.0 will do 
when building packages.

--
Michael L. Hitch                        mhitch%montana.edu@localhost
Computer Consultant
Information Technology Center
Montana State University        Bozeman, MT     USA