Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 15:29:15 -0500 From: Craig Metz <cmetz@inner.net> To: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Subject: Random FreeBSD things Message-ID: <199602221958.OAA00987@inner.net>
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I just ran into a place where Linux made me *very* unhappy (a wierd bug in the LANCE driver in modern experimental kernels = every OTHER LANCE board works...), so I figured I'd give FreeBSD a try on one of my scratch 386s to see if modern versions felt like working. Older versions really DIDN'T feel like working, but they were also recognized as having wierd problems. The scratch 386 is a 386/25 with 387, 8MB RAM, 340MB Caviar, 3.5" floppy, AT1500BT, Paradise VGA, and Intel motherboard -- nothing at all wierd. Ok, so I boot the 2.2 snapshot floppies. The menu program doesn't work, period. It'll ask you lots of questions, it also won't actually suceed in anything. Not much of a surprise. So I go to the shell (I'm a crank; I WANT a shell for an OS install). ls? No, you mean reboot! Turns out any program execution from the shell leads to a soft reboot. Not cool. So I go to the 2.1-release floppies. The menu program still doesn't work, no surprise. I go to the shell. The good news is that program executions don't reboot the machine, which is a good sign. The bad news is that every program execution requires loading the program off the floppy. Uh, where's the buffercache?! Not on the floppy, that's for sure. Painful as it became, I was able to partition and label the hard drive and make the filesystem. Odd, not as many superblock backups as I would expect, but anyway. Then I bring up the interface and try a ping. Well, I tried, but someone apparently forgot /etc/protocols. Ugh. So I try FTP, and get "network down". ?? Subsequent painful debugging yields that it didn't actually decide to add the automatic route table entry. So I add that, and the problem persists. It really doesn't want to ARP anything. No ideas why. So, conclusions: 1. Could someone please make an install floppy that works like the one in NetBSD or BSD/OS? I want a simple shell script and a quick and easy way to a prompt. The menu program never worked for me, doesn't work now, and is too cute anyway. I'm sure there's more than one crank like me out there. 2. Did something magically change from standard 4.4/4.4-Lite to FreeBSD as far as interface and route configuration that would cause these problems or is something just broken? The kernel is properly finding the board. 3. Something's fubar with the buffercache. Not caching the floppy is really, really painful for installs. MFS = ramdisk, right? Then why is it trying to load everything off the floppy anyway if most of the utils are in that big all-in-one binary on the ramdisk? I don't get it. -Craig
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