I am trying to install 6.1.4/i386 on this Dell Inspiron 3700, without much success. The installer's kernel either stops at piixide0 and doesn't go any further, or uvm_fault's while detecting esm0.
Here are the two screens (sorry for the jpegs, no cereal around): http://stare.cz/dmesg/dell-inspiron-3700-netbsd1.jpg http://stare.cz/dmesg/dell-inspiron-3700-netbsd2.jpg That's with the default boot option (1). The same happens with option (2) - no acpi, as the acpi isn't used anyway, because "BIOS is too old". The BIOS updates only exist as *.exe files of course. (Or does anyone have a UNIX friendly way to update BIOS on these machines?) The same also happens with (3) - no acpi, no smp, as there is no smp either. For comparison, here is a fresh install of OpenBSD: http://stare.cz/dmesg/dell-inspiron-3700.20140430 Is there something obvious I am missing? Is there a specific problem with these Inspirons that I need to solve before I can install NetBSD on them? My primary motivation is to augment the OpenBSD audio driver http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=maestro&arch=i386 (it's a maestro, see the OpenBSD dmesg) to also have recording. I was advised to also try other *BSDs and try to steal from them (I couldn't install FreeBSD either). Reading http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?esm+.i386+NetBSD-current it seems NetBSD has full duplex for these audio chips ... Jan
