Big problems with 7.1 locking up :-(

[Pete Carah]

Well, following up on my own reply earlier, I csup'd releng_7 with a 
date of last dec 1; the result works fine
in the laptop.  I'll reload the eastern soekris tonight and see how it 
does.  If the soekris is fine also then this gives a data point for 
whenever the bad commit(s) happened.

I had apparently made the mistaken assumption that a general release 
should be better debugged than the work-in-progress leading up to it...

As I noted before - I'm in the business of *using* computers, not doing 
fbsd kernel work (I actually do linux kernel
(device driver) work in $dayjob, but so far prefer fbsd for general use, 
like routers and servers.)

I need to regen the soekris config here with the 12.01 also; if it 
doesn't hang either then I can hope that someone can
look through commit notes (I certainly don't have the time or internal 
knowledge of 7.x to do so) and try figure out
what may have happened.  My daughter is tired of rebooting the soekris 
that is 2800 miles west of here.

One extra data point: the systems that work OK with the release code 
have Intel chipsets (older - ich3 and ich5).  The laptop is an AMD64 in 
32-bit mode with an ATI chipset and broadcom wireless (hence uses 
project evil, which has its own problems with hangs).  Soekris is Geode 
SC1100 with its own builtin "chipset", presumably a mish-mash of things 
from Cyrix, National, and AMD, given the Geode series's history.  It is 
not possible to gen a system or kernel on the soekris; gcc 4.x won't run 
in 128mb of ram with no swap (they run from cf cards; swap is not possible.)
I have to cross-compile them and reload the cf cards externally if 
possible; if not I use nfs (which breaks the system
badly if it hangs during a make install; this happened this past 
weekend, fortunately not on the other coast :-(

-- Pete