Problems booting 9.1-STABLE on Netra X1

[Chris Ross]

On Feb 25, 2013, at 4:49 PM, Marius Strobl wrote:
> Yes, IMO this approach is inappropriate as there really seems to be
> something broken with this particular machine rather than this issue
> being a general problem with that model, i.e. nobody else running
> FreeBSD on an X1 reported this so far. I don't own an X1 but I do
> have a v100, which employ a mainboard pretty much identical to that
> of X1 and even also identify themselves as SUNW,UltraAX-i2, but don't
> see such a problem, i.e. neither the power fail interrupt firing nor
> strange hangs, either. Once I have a replacement for the broken
> hardware of my committatron I can make registering the power fail
> interrupt a tunable defaulting to on though.


  Well, Dave McGuire did respond on that thread that he was running 
NetBSD 4.0.1 with no problems, but someone else (Jochen Kunz)
said they tried netbooting a 4.0.1 kernel on an X1 and got the same
hang I did.

  The code that's in place in the NetBSD tree was actually committed
later, it seems, as a result of this other thread that the earlier thread
was resurrected on:

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc64/2011/02/12/msg001515.html

  So, at least 2 people, and 3 if I'm reading my personal email archives
correctly, have seen this problem on an X1.  And, it seems at least one
person was _not_ seeing it.  (But later seeing some other problem when
a CD-ROM was attached to the IDE bus, even when not in use/netbooting)

  It's clearly low-end hardware, and I could believe that it may be a "affects
some but not all systems".  But, assuming it's more than just _one_ bogus
system, finding a way to deal with it at HEAD makes sense.  Not necessarily
that the earlier code is the only or best solution.

                          - Chris