rmyers@net1.ucsd.edu (Robert Myers) (06/03/89)
Hello Ultrix 3.0 installers: I'm having some problems and would appreciate any kind of useful answers or suggestions. Hardware: 1 VAXstation II with 5MB ram Monochrome system DEQNA RD54 hard disk TK50 tape drive RX50 dual diskette drive 1 VAXstation II/GPX with 5MB ram Color (8-plane) system DEQNA DHV11, 8 channel MUX RD53 and RD54 hard disks Emulex controller for Cypher 880, a nine track tape drive TK50 tape drive DT2651 and DT2658 Data Translation image processing boards The installation: OK, this was the first time I had ever done a major op. system installation. I wasn't absolutely sure I could do it, but by looking through the installation manuals I figured it wouldn't be too hard. The VAXstation II installation went perfectly, and I added the necessary network configuration stuff. The system has been up and on the local net for about 2 weeks now. The VAXstation II/GPX installation also went pretty well. On installation all the devices were recognized except the DT boards. This wasn't too surprising since they have a custom device driver, not supported by DEC. I figured I would just test the new operating system without the driver, leaving the boards on the Q-bus but inaccessible. I added the network configuration stuff in single user mode, then rebooted into multi-user mode. Once the login prompter came up, I tried to log in as root. It seemed to accept the login, the screen was filled only with the background cross-hatch pattern. Then blank lines were written directly to the console, the screen blinked, the blank lines were now filled with text, apparently columns of hexadecimal numbers. The machine was frozen, so I pressed the halt button and rebooted to single user mode. I did an fsck, which found problems in the root partition. I messed around for at least two days with this problem, and finally found that if I didn't execute "ifconfig qe0 ..." in /etc/rc.local it would at least let me log in without frying the machine. In other words, if networking is disabled, the system runs fine. I tried taking all of the stuff concerning the DT board's device driver from the previous Ultrix 2.0 system, then reinstalling it. The kernel was rebuilt successfully, but when I tried to boot from it, the machine died in the middle of reboot with a "panic" message. After a couple of shots at this, I gave up. Now, when Ultrix 2.0 was on this machine, everything worked perfectly. So, as far as I'm concerned the hardware is in good working order. Under Ultrix 3.0, everything except the networking seems to be working fine. Of course, the DT image processing boards aren't usable since the kernel doen't have the device drivers for them yet. So, the only pieces of hardware I'm wondering about right now are the Color video subsystem and the DT boards. Questions: Are there any known bugs in Ultrix 3.0 involving the Color video 8-plane subsystem or the DEQNA on the VAXstation II/GPX? Is it possible that having the DT boards on the Q-bus without their device driver in the kernel is causing any of these problems? Is there anything different about device drivers for Ultrix 3.0 compared to Ultrix 2.0? Is there anything I'm missing here, or being stupid about? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) (06/03/89)
In article <1744@ucsd.EDU> rmyers@net1.ucsd.edu (Robert Myers) writes: > > I tried taking all of the stuff concerning the DT board's device driver > from the previous Ultrix 2.0 system, then reinstalling it. The kernel > was rebuilt successfully, but when I tried to boot from it, the machine > died in the middle of reboot with a "panic" message. After a couple of > shots at this, I gave up. > > Is there anything different about device drivers for Ultrix 3.0 > compared to Ultrix 2.0? Well, the most obvious thing is that they changed the memory allocation routines around. This is described in section 2.5.3 of the Ultrix 3.0 release notes. There's no reason to believe that any piece of kernel level object code will be compatible between releases. It would really be nice if DEC included a cumulative "incompatibilities with BSD 4.2/Ultrix 1.0/Ultrix..." section in the release notes. Not everybody has/keeps the whole set. -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)