On Sun, 5 Feb 2006, Nick Holland wrote:
Charles Sprickman wrote:
Hello all,
I'm still not able to get OpenBSD 3.4->3.8 loaded on my old firewall box.
It either freezes or panics when probing (or creating?) "rd0", which I
assume is the ramdisk used in the install. It runs 3.3 fine.
So rather than just asking some random questions, I'd like to know how to
save a dump when booting off of the install CD. I do have a serial console
available (set tty com0). If getting a dump isn't possible, I'd then like
to know how to get into the kernel debugger.
I figure that I can gather information that's more helpful this way.
You aren't going to get nor save a dump when booting off the install CD.
You really don't want a panicked kernel writing to your good data disks, do
you?
In this case, I don't mind. I've got another box in it's place so I'm
prepared to do anything I need to do to get this running a current version
of OBSD.
The install kernels don't have all the bells and whistles of the production
kernel, that's how they fit on floppies and such.
Got it, so there's absolutely no way to dump to a disk? It looks like it
tries to... I also don't have another box handy to build a custom 3.8
kernel on. And I also wonder if a non-rd kernel would panic, as the panic
happens as it tries to deal with the ramdisk...
Use your serial cable to capture the output of the boot process. THAT will
tell us much more about your hardware.
I've got a thread here:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=113666599500003&r=1&w=2
I reposted since I just wanted to get the basics on getting a dump in
OBSD. I figured once I had that, I could actually file a PR or something.
A completely Wild A..ed Guess, based on the symptoms, you may have way too
little RAM for the newer kernels (16M will get you running still, but 32M is
a practical minimum) and floating point emulation broke after 3.3 on i386
(translation: no more 486sx or 80386 w/o 80387 support). If I were to bet,
I'd say you probably have no FPU on your machine.
It's old, but not that old. I've got 128MB of RAM. Processor is an AMD
K6-2/500 clocked down to 300. VIA chipset. I've had memtest86+ go
through about a dozen runs with no errors. 3.3 works flawlessly.
Not sure where to go from here...
Thanks,
Charles
Nick.
