[BUGS] Worth persuing or try NetBSD?

[Andy Farkas]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Andrew Reilly <areilly at bigpond.net.au> wrote:

...
> Does your gateway box have any possibility of access to a CD-ROM
> drive?  If it does, I would strongly suggest that the fastest and
> least troublesome way to get to where you want to go will be to
> backup your config and user files, and do a reformat and install
> from the sysinstall ISO of the version of choice.  At the very
> least that will give you a taste to see if more recent versions
> deal more nicely with your AMR controller than 6.1.

It has a CD-ROM drive. I have tried to install from CD with both 6.4-R
and 7.1-R CDs. Both fail to install (hangs on I/O). I doubt 8.0 will
be any different.

> Any particular reason to keep trying 6.1, rather than jumping
> forward to 6-last (or 7- or 8-), to see if the problem has been
> solved in the mean time?

Yes, the reason is that 6.1-R is when the "mega update" went into the
tree and is the closest to 6.0-R which works fine.

> I'm running 8-STABLE on a box nearly that old, albeit without the
> fancy disk interface, so it should be reasonable.

I'm sure if I changed disk controller, kernels after 6.1-R would work.

I am convinced the amr(4) driver broke between 6.0-R and 6.1-R for my
peice of (old) hardware. I would like to learn more about kgdb and how
to debug a crashdump. I have the low-level knowledge on how hardware
works as I used to write OS/2 device drivers for a living and am quite
proficient with assembler language. Grog's tutorial tells me things
I already know. What I need is more info on how to drive kgdb.

I think I will post to the freebsd-scsi list.

Thanks for your thoughts.

-andyf