perl 5.8 on 5.2.1

[Matthew Seaman]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 06:52:31AM -0400, dave wrote:

>     Is anyone using perl 5.8 on 5.2.1? I do a fresh install, cvsup my ports
> and source, install a new world and kernel, get all that working fine, then
> do the perl 5.8 install. This goes fine. I then do:
> use.perl port
>     reboot and at the boot menu where i have to select an option 1 for
> normal startup etc. my system freezes. Any clues?

I think that blaming perl for the failure of your system to start up
is probably not correct.  Perl has nothing to do with the early stages
of booting, and your system should certainly be able to get to at
least single-user mode, and I'd be very surprised indeed if you could
use perl to freeze the whole boot process unless you deliberately set
out to do something like that.  You might freeze a single process, but
you can usually just hit Ctrl-C to kill it and carry on booting the
rest of the system.

You don't actually need to reboot after installing perl and running
'use.perl port' -- once you've done that all you need do is restart
any long running perl processes (if any) and you're home and dry.

Without much more detail, like how far through the boot process you
can get and exactly what you see on the screen when the system
freezes, it's going to be impossible to say for certain what the
problem is.  However, at a guess, for problems experienced during boot
I'd be far more suspicious of things like ACPI or APIC.  If something
like that is the problem, you should be able to boot in 'safe mode',
and then look into setting some sysctl(8)s from loader.conf to turn
that functionality on or off during the default boot sequence.  Search
the FreeBSD mailing list archives for examples -- there's been plenty
of discussion on this sort of topic on the freebsd-current list for
example.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20040808/edb4ed1a/attachment.bin