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Re: NetBSD/vax - worth continuing?



On 2016-09-20 21:24, Anders Magnusson wrote:
Den 2016-09-20 kl. 19:12, skrev Johnny Billquist:
Hi, Ragge...

On 2016-09-20 18:01, Anders Magnusson wrote:
Hi Johnny,

Well, I run it, on a 4000/90 :-)   But I do not build the system
natively, not enough disk and NFS takes forever.

I've been running it on and off on a 4000/90 as well. But not doing
things natively means that a lot of problems are not seen.

It's known that there are problems with gcc, gnats gives some hints
about that.
Unfortunately I cannot spend time to jump into gcc for debugging also...

Me neither. Especially since I have found gcc to be almost
impenetrable in the past.

But, I do not have any hanging problems, must be something specific to
the 8600.  Have you checked where it actually hangs?

Tried work that out many times, but never gotten far. You want console
access to a hung or crashed system? :-)
If you cannot get into DDB then something really evil has happened. Is
this the case?

No. Seems I must have really mis-stated this. The system hangs as in the OS stalls. The hardware is working fine, and I can break into DDB as well. If I were to make a guess, it appears that all processes that do disk I/O stalls. Other things continue running. But as most things touch disk sooner or later, pretty much everything draws to a standstill.

But the system is not catatonic.

For the rest of the audience; the 8650 is a "real" vax and much more
sensitive to low-level errors than the newer VAXen.  Therefore things
that work fine on later VAXen may fail totally on an 8650. (Or 750, or
something old).

Anyway; if it hangs hard and no DDB, have the kernel available on some
other VAX and use gdb to find where (after a ^P HALT on the 8650).
Check PSL and the regs and unwind the stack manually with the help of
gdb.  In less than 10 minutes you have found the offending code path :-)

Nah. I can get into DDB. All processes are just sitting there.

	Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


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