I have an old Soekris net4511 with 64MB RAM and a hardware crypto accelerator that was running 5.4 off of a 8 GB CF card. This weekend, I finally decided to update it to 5.5. When I took it offline, it had a 200+ day uptime, with an irc client running in a tmux session for much of that time. It’s been a reliable little box.
I gave the system a fresh installation of openbsd 5.5, partitioned as follows: a - 1GB / d - 3GB /usr e - the rest (~3.5GB) /home I went to install the 2 main packages I needed: emacs (no_x11) and git. During the installation process, I noticed that it would either hang or crash with a strange message. After a few failed tries, I reinstalled 5.4 to verify that the hardware was still good (i was getting some write errors and figured the CF card might be going bad). With 5.4, emacs and git installed just fine. I then tried to install 5.5 again, this time to a different card (4 GB - single root partition) so I could swap between the two to test things. This time git hung at about 71% of extracting the git package (all dependencies installed fine). I power cycled the system and tried again, and it succeeded. When I went to install emacs, the dependencies installed fine but when the emacs-24.3p4-no_x11 package was extracting, it crashed at 69% with the following message: 559 (perl): user write of 122880@0x23652000 at 184688 failed: 14 Segmentation fault I’m curious what could have changed between 5.4 and 5.5 that would cause this. I run this system without a swap partition to prevent wear on the CF card, but 5.4 had a 200+ day uptime with it, so that wasn’t a problem before. Perhaps 5.5 is a bit more memory intensive and needs the swap? Or maybe it’s time to just put this box to rest… or stay with 5.4? Is there anything else I could do to help troubleshoot? Or is this not worth the effort... Jordon
