From: rivers@ponds.uucp (Thomas David Rivers)
Subject: General problems (serial line, spontaneous reboots)
Summary: Reboots, serial probs
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 02:51:30 GMT



I'm *very* pleased to get the newest 386bsd; it looks like some
really nice work.

I just thought I would report some problems I'm seeing  and some
possible areas to examine?)


First of all, I'd like to report that the cursor seems to be confused
for monochrome cards.  The line appears above the space instead of
below it.  I got around this by using a CGA card displaying on my
monochrome monitor (a clever little card from an old Tandy 1200H
machine.)

Next, with respect to silo overflows in the serial driver.
I was *plagued* with them when I was using an MFM disk, replacing
that with an IDE disk appears to have corrected the problem.  Could
there be a problem with interrupts being left too high, too long in the
wd driver?

Next, I noticed that when running screen (the binary supplied in the
etc01 distribution) on a serial line, the characters get buffered
an extra time, some how, some where.  This isn't the case for screen
running on the console; so there could be a problem in the serial driver
(i.e. probably not the pty driver.)

Next, I thought I would try and replace the com driver with the latest
one I had for 0.0 (in which Chris cgd@agate.berkeley.edu had implement
bidirectional lines); however, the first compile of the locked up (it was
over a serial line.)  I could type *nothing* anywhere and get any
response - even ctrl-alt-delete; so I powered down and rebooted.

After the fsck's; I restarted the compile on the console instead of over
a serial line.  This time, compiling part of ../../vm, the machine
spontaneously rebooted.

The third time was the charmer, and I got everything compiled...

So, now, after complaining so much :-), let me offer one trivial
helpful hint.  To compile trek (in the etc01 distribution) you need
to remove the -lcompat from the Makefile line (there is no compat library
for 386bsd), and properly define gtty() in main.c.  I added the following
two lines just before main():

#define gtty(fd, argp) ioctl(fd, TIOCGETP, argp)
#define stty(fd, argp) ioctl(fd, TIOCSETP, argp)


Finally, let me give anyone concerned my configuration details:

    Hardware: DTK KEEN2000 (20mhz 386), with IIT FPU, with ROMs dating
              from 1988.
    Video: CGA adapter (displaying on monochrome)
    Disk: Connor Peripheral 240AT (IDE)

    I re-installed everything myself (going by Chris's instructions, 
  thanks Chris) to provide a large swap space and separate / and /usr
  partitions, my disklabel looks like (in case is an obvious problem
  with my swap partition):

type: ESDI
disk: qp240at
label:
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 36
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 576
cylinders: 832
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0

8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:    81792        0    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0 - 141)
  b:    36864    81792      swap                        # (Cyl.  142 - 205)
  c:   479232        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 831)
  h:   359424   118656    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.  206 - 829)


        - Dave Rivers -
        (rivers@ponds.uucp)

p.s. If anyone would like it, I have disktab entries for a CP240AT (as above)
     and a Micropolis 1325/1335.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd