[1113] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Troubled i386 boxes: serial ports, custom kernels, etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams)
Thu Feb 13 12:48:35 1997
To: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
From: "Nathan J. Williams" <nathanw@MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 12:47:43 EST
I have several troubled i386 boxes running 1.2/sipb-athena
7.7.2. The biggest problem is that on all three machines, while tty00
reliably works for terminals or serial mice, tty01 does not; terminals
connected to it either get no data or recieve "x~`" or other
combinations of those characters. All three machines have just two
serial ports, at the normal PC addresses and IRQ.
Also, I built a custom kernel for one machine, which worked
fine, but the other two aren't nearly as happy. One gets continuous
timeout errors on the ed2 device and fails to attach to the net with
its custom kernel; the other either spontaneously reboots when booting
its custom kernel or blanks the screen for the boot process, then
redisplays long enough to panic with "priveleged instruction fault in
supervisor mode" and dumps. Savecore seems to not find the dump when
the system is rebooted with the ATHENAOTHER kernel, though.
The first machine as a Gateway 2000 P75, with everything but
the network card and video card on the motherboard and a 3.1G IDE
drive. The other two machines are no-name machines with 486dx2/66
motherboards with VESA local buses (no brand name; even the manuals
don't list a company or brand) and two local bus cards: the
IDE/floppy/serial/parallel controller and the video card.
I'd really like to make these machines stable and usable and
run serial terminals; does anyone have ideas on what might be causing
some of these problems? I'm pretty sure that the hardware isn't
completely broken; in a previous incarnation when all the machines
were running Linux, the serial ports and other devices pretty much
worked.
- Nathan
