Re: Installing on Loongson2f causing sysinst segmentation fault

On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 2:50 AM Martin Husemann <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Can you give me a short description of your working 8.x installation and
> a few details about the upgrade you tried?

Hi Martin,

Will do my best and please see the replies below.

>
> How do you boot the installer, is it on a USB stick?

I put the installer and kernel onto the ext2 partition and instructed
PMON to find it on this drive.  I tried to use a USB drive but somehow
PMON cannot find it through (usb0,0) even though usbtree can show the
device is connected so I gave up on it.  This is also why I tried to
preserve the ext2 drive during the installation.

> What is the target disk you installed to (or where you want to upgrade
> the system)?

I tried to install it to /dev/wd0.

>
> If the target disk is wd0, I would like to see output of a few commands
> and your (netbsd 8.x) /etc/fstab - please feel free to mail me the details
> off-list.

Here it is:

yeeloong-netbsd$ cat /etc/fstab
# NetBSD /etc/fstab
# See /usr/share/examples/fstab/ for more examples.
/dev/wd0a               /       ffs     rw               1 1
/dev/wd0b               none    swap    sw,dp            0 0
kernfs          /kern   kernfs  rw
ptyfs           /dev/pts        ptyfs   rw
procfs          /proc   procfs  rw
/dev/cd0a               /cdrom  cd9660  ro,noauto
tmpfs           /var/shm        tmpfs   rw,-m1777,-sram%25

>
> I am interested in the output of (assuming wd0 is your target disk):
>
>         fdisk wd0

yeeloong-netbsd# fdisk wd0
Disk: /dev/rwd0
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 310101, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 312581808, bytes/sector: 512

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1024, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 312581808

Partitions aligned to 2048 sector boundaries, offset 2048

Partition table:
0: Linux native (sysid 131)
    start 2048, size 3903488 (1906 MB, Cyls 0-243/27/40)
        PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
1: NetBSD (sysid 169)
    start 4194304, size 308387504 (150580 MB, Cyls
261/21/17-19457/80/63), Active
        PBR is not bootable: Bad magic number (0x195f)
2: <UNUSED>
3: <UNUSED>
First active partition: 1
Drive serial number: 1405439929 (0x53c54fb9)

>         disklabel wd0

yeeloong-netbsd# disklabel wd0
# /dev/rwd0:
type: unknown
disk: ESDI/IDE disk
label:
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 310101
total sectors: 312581808
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
drivedata: 0

16 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a: 287414064   4194304     4.2BSD   4096 32768     0  # (Cyl.   4161*- 289294*)
 b:  20973440 291608368       swap                     # (Cyl. 289294*- 310100)
 c: 312581808         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 - 310100)

>
> (I might need a few more details depending on the output here)
>
> Did you try a new installation or upgrading?

I actually tried both installation and upgrading.

For installation, when booting from netbsd-INSTALL_LOONGSON from 9.2,
as soon as I tried to mark the NetBSD parition active the sysinst will
crash with the error I posted in the first mail.  This doesn't happen
with the sysinst from 8.2.

After I installed 8.2-RELEASE, I also tried to upgrade to 9.2 using
the 9.2-RELEASE sysinst.  As I don't have to change the disk I passed
the aforementioned part that could crash sysinst.  However, when
downloading the sets for installation sysinst spammed the screen with
errors saying disk full.  I had to kill the process and found out that
the sysinst tried to unpack everything into the ramfs instead of the
mounted wd0.  I suspect this is also what caused the previous error.

As I can have an 8.2 system now I made a few more attempts on trying
to upgrade to 9.2 or current.

I first tried the daily snapshot which ended up with the same errors
as the 9.2-RELEASE installer.  So this is a no-go and confirms that
the issue is still present in the latest snapshot.

I then tried to use the 8.2-RELEASE sysinst and upgrade by pointing to
the 9.2-RELEASE sets, which actually finished and I seemed to have got
a working 9.2 installation that I can boot. However, after some use I
found that on this 9.2 system anything could randomly crash in
segmentation fault when building something in pkgsrc: gcc, sh, mv,
mkdir, etc.  Anything could crash at any time randomly.  Initially I
thought maybe I used the wrong kernel, so I tried both 9.2 kernels and
8.2 kernels with elf64 or elf32 variants, but nothing helped. On the
contrary, the properly installed 8.2 system is rock solid.  So I
suspect using the 8.2 installer to install 9.2 sets ended up in
something seriously wrong, which I hope doesn't mean the 9.2 cannot
work on my Yeeloong box anymore.  If needed I can try to provide more
info or file a proper bug report.

Thanks, and let me know if any more information may be helpful.

>
> Thanks
>
> Martin