Re: [GXemul-devel] NetBSD/hpcmips install fails under GXemul 0.6.1

[Anders G. <ga...@gm...>]

> Hi,
> GXemul 0.6.1 is having trouble installing NetBSD/hpcmips.
> More details here:
> http://gnats.netbsd.org/54252

Hi Andreas,

I think I may have found the revision where this broke.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r5906 | debug | 2018-06-13 15:13:23 +0200 (Wed, 13 Jun 2018) | 1 line

Fixing an old TODO for invalidating translation caches when using non-4KB
pages for MIPS. This makes HelenOS 0.7.1/malta boot further than before.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

At least on my machine, installing NetBSD 8.0 and booting after install to
a working login as root worked fine up to revision 5905, but not with 5906
and forward.

(Except for the usual problem of /dev/ttyE0 not being enabled by default,
so login via serial console doesn't work "out of the box".)

I will investigate that fix, and see if it can be done some other way.

A wild guess as to the cause of the bug: The VR4121 has 1 KB pages which I
guess are buggy in GXemul. I don't know how much of that NetBSD uses in
practice, perhaps it mostly uses 4 KB pages.

Also, this is a good opportunity to clean up the GXemul documentation and
create up-to-date regression testing scripts for hpcmips; many of the modes
(MobilePro 770, 800, and 880) seem to have bit-rotted over time when
booting NetBSD with -X. Most likely due to incompleteness of emulation.
These modes only seem to work with serial console these days. Luckily,
MobilePro 780 emulation still works with both serial and graphical console.
:-)


Anders