Re: IBM Workpad z50 dmesg collection

...on Mon, May 17, 2021 at 06:49:14PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:

 > Excellent - thanks (and sorry for reply latency on this)

No worries, I've been sitting on this thing for years :)

 > - Does the latest
 > http://nyftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/latest/hpcmips/ kernel
 > boot? In the unlikely event of the pcmcia issue being fixed since 9.x
 > its probably worth checking

I didn't try HEAD yet, but I did a quick boot of the NetBSD 9.2 
release kernel.

Unfortunately no dmesg again, as I'm still out of a serial cable, 
and neither network nor storage are operable - it looks ok in the 
dmesg at first (ne0 is detected, as is wd0), but then it ends up 
with a "wd0: IDENTIFY failed", and when using the installer kernel, 
it sais no usable network device has been found.

I took a photo of the bottom of the dmesg on screen, currently 
available here:
https://cloud.gxis.eu/index.php/s/N3bw45GfDqSLAXg

 > - For the 8.x boots, I wonder if it could be floating point or shared
 > library related. There are static linked binaries in /rescue,
 > including 'sleep', 'expr' & 'ps' which can use floating point. It may
 > be worth a small amount of testing to see if an error can be triggered
 > with a /bin/ vs /rescue/ binary

I can try that tomorrow. As far as I have seen while building 
several NetBSD/hpcmips releases, the userland doesn't use -msoft-float 
in general (while most of the kernel does, except for some locore stuff), 
so I assume the system depends on some floating point emulation directly
in the kernel?

From NetBSD 8 on, ld throws a warning when linking the kernel, 
because -msoft-float and -mhard-float bits are being mixed - but 
seems it's the same in earlier versions, except that it doesn't 
create a warning during the build.

(The linker warning has been mentioned on the list a couple of 
years ago, and the answer was that it's expected to occur.)

 > - What would you require as a minimum for testing - just a built
 > kernel? (Thinking about bisecting the device issue between 8 & 9)

Yes, a hpcmips GENERIC kernel will do. I can also do builds 
myself, but I'm afraid I haven't really understood the workflow 
around selecting commits and git bisect up to now (sorry, I haven't 
really been using git beyond the occasional fetch / checkout).

Alex.