Re: How do you use old versions?

...on Fri, May 07, 2021 at 06:32:53PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:

 > Testing ideas based on comments so far:
 > - 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 & 8.0 kernels (as mentioned before, this should all be
 > possible from a single 7.x install and just switching boot kernels)

I did most of that pretty much a year ago, but my notes from that 
are not complete.

7.0.2: everything seems ok, though the installer is very tight 
on RAM, and depending on the phase of the moon setting up hard 
disk partitions runs out of memory (I think I went back to an 
5.x installer in order to set up space for NetBSD on my new 
CF card).

7.2: doesn't even boot the install kernel

8.0 and up: Install kernel boots, but userland throws "floating 
point exception" left and right. Someone wrote back then that 
other mips softfloat platforms seem to have a similar problem. 
PCMCIA cards are detected, but none of them work (ne2k keeps 
sending  "ne0:  where did the card go?", xi has no carrier 
detection, everything wireless is a fail - didn't try PCMCIA 
storage).

9.x: Pretty much the same, except now CF storage is wonky too.

Anyways, I'll try to do some more organized testing tomorrow 
and will feed in the results. Maybe it'll turn out that it's 
better to abandon the hpcmips platform (or at least the z50 
as supported system) instread of trying to fix all the mess 
(I can do bug reporting and test builds and such, but I'm not 
a programmer, much less when hardware is involved).

Alex.