sparcstation 20 cgfourteen crashes

[darf]

Hi, I am new to NetBSD so please bare with me...

I recently installed NetBSD on my old SS20, the install went without a hitch, the machine boots and everything is fine except...

After a while or (I suspect) when I use commands that use the scrollback on the console the entire thing crashes and I have to reboot the machine.

To be specific netbsd itself does not crash and I can still access the box from ssh but the framebuffer freezes up and displays garbage. It looks like it cannot handle the resolution or something.

Anyway I am at a loss because the issue is so random and I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on where to start looking

Its an SS20 with a cgfourteen framebuffer, solaris 8 works fine on it out of the box with CDE and all the trimmings. But I'd rather use something more fun. Note here that I have a native sun monitor and a sun type 4 keyboard/mouse attached to it.

I looked at the FAQ entry regarding garbage from a serial console cgsix but I am not sure if it is the same issue or related in some way since it talks about serial console rather than what I have which is a sun monitor and a cgfourteen.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

[IdOp]

Hi darf, and welcome to DaemonForums.

I can't answer your main question about the Sun hardware, but, would it be a possible work-around to run something like tmux or screen in your console, and use their scroll-back buffers instead?

[darf]

Hi thanks for having me!

Just typing in screen causes the screen/framebuffer to go all garbled

Theoretically I can just use this box headless which is what I am doing anyway but I was maybe wondering if I am missing a driver or if I need to recompile my kernel to include a driver that is not in by default?

I also noticed that running X -configure complains about missing drivers so it got me thinking that I'm definitely missing something here.

PS: X -configure runs and creates a log but it causes the crashed aforementioned too since it scrolls into the buffer

[IdOp]

That's too bad about screen. I'm not sure if tmux would do any better, but if there's a package of it for your platform it might be worth a try?

Regarding missing drivers and error messages, perhaps you could post your dmesg output, and any relevant parts of error messages and X logs. (They should be placed in between [code ] and [/code ] tags (with no spaces in the tags as I just did).) They might help someone knowledgeable about your platform to understand the problem better.

[BSDfan666]

While I generally don't like advertising something someone isn't enquiring about, perhaps it may be worthwhile to try installing OpenBSD/sparc on this system?

[Oko]

X -configure does NOT work on sparc hardware. Actually to be precise Xenocara
OpenBSD version of XOrg has now support for X -configure on sparc64. NetBSD uses ancient version of XOrg (pre-modular 6.9). I would do fresh minimal installation of NetBSD (cvs source and build stable as 5.02 release is full of bugs), then use pkgsrc to add modular XOrg. You should create xorg.conf by hand. NetBSD should have a template for that. If not read OpenBSD FAQ. NetBSD sparc64 port is full of bugs and in practical sense dead. I am not going to advocate OS which I use OpenBSD but when it comes to sparc hardware OpenBSD is second to none!

Cheers,
OKO

P.S. I have sparc station next to me but I use it mostly to debug compiling errors.

[darf]

Thanks for your input guys, looks like I should be trying OpenBSD instead, I'll do that and see how it goes.

As for errors I have none showing anywhere, dmesg has no errors at all during boot or after it crashes. Nor does any other log file.

Thanks again!

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by darf

...looks like I should be trying OpenBSD instead, I'll do that and see how it goes.

While installing the OpenBSD port is an option, if you want to explore NetBSD's version further, I would highly suggest joining the appropriate NetBSD mailing list & ask your question(s) there. Many of NetBSD's developers monitor their lists, so if an answer exists, you will likely get solid information. Information on subscribing can be found at the following:

http://netbsd.org/mailinglists/