29/Mar/2008

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:04:02 -0400

I wanted to test a sysinst fix. Installing in qemu or bochs is a little slow. gxemul is lot faster, but building sysinst with cross-compiler took too long. hubertf reminded me about vnd which is already detected by sysinst. First I created my image the wrong way:

dd if=/dev/zero of=sysinst.vnd.image bs=1 count=1 seek=1048576000

That is the wrong way because the sparse file later failed in disklabel with:

disklabel: ioctl DIOCWDINFO: Input/output error

So I created a 400 MB file and the vnode with the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/tmp/sysinst.vnd.image bs=2048 count=204800
sudo vnconfig vnd0 sysinst.vnd.image

My built my custom src/distrib/utils/sysinst/ and ran it:

sudo ./arch/amd64/sysinst

sysinst gave choice of my wd0 (in use) or the vnd0. So I chose the vnode and could use it. If sysinst had it mounted I could look under /targetroot/. Or I could mount with:

sudo mount /dev/vnd0a /mnt

Also I could see the vnode and remove the vnode with:

sudo vnconfig -l

sudo vnconfig -u vnd0

By the way, I was doing this so I could fix a bug with rc.conf generation of the DHCP or manual network configuration. I used sysinst to install just base and etc sets using the local file system /usr/src/obj/releasedir.

17/Mar/2008

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:02:32 -0400

I learned about many emulators after I asked on netbsd-users a couple days ago. I found many useful websites plus http://www.netbsd.org/ports/emulators.html.

I installed gxemul, simh, es40 (wip), and tme. (I have already used bochs and qemu.)

I tried gxemul for hpcmips and pmax. I created "sparse" files for the pseudo disk image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=nbsd_hpcmips.img bs=1024 count=1 seek=3000000

dd if=/dev/zero of=nbsd_pmax.img bs=1024 count=1 seek=3000000

I fetched 4.0 files for: hpcmipscd-4.0.iso, hpcmips' netbsd-GENERIC.gz, hpcmips installation netbsd.gz kernel, and pmaxcd-4.0.iso. I installed hpcmips on emulated MobilePro 770 with:

gxemul -e mobilepro770 -X -d nbsd_hpcmips.img -d b:hpcmipscd-4.0.iso netbsd.gz

sysinst was the same as i386 and had MBR editor too. Then I booted into new install with:

gxemul -e mobilepro770 -X -d nbsd_hpcmips.img netbsd-GENERIC.gz

It had no network support. dmesg said it was 98.303MHz and 32MB ram. Any way to verify if it is really 98.303MHz? Is that accurate? Next I installed pmax with:

gxemul -x -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img -d b:pmaxcd-4.0.iso

Note that capital -X switch is to enable framebuffer. And lower-case -x is to open an xterm. In this case it emulated a serial console. The sysinst didn't have a MBR editor on pmax platform. I was able to boot the new install with:

gxemul -x -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img

I see its console was a serial device. Any way to know what /dev/console actually is? Also I could not find any docs for "dz", "lkkbd" or "vsms". Where are these documented?

gxemul is way faster to me than bochs or qemu. Later, I will test simh-vax, es40 (for AlphaServer), and tme (for Sun). I am using these to document some installation and administration steps that may differ on various platforms for my NetBSD book in progress. Email me if you want to look at the 80+ page outline.

Jeremy C. Reed's blog

29/Mar/2008

17/Mar/2008