I’ve compared hundreds of files between the working and non-working NetBSD versions and almost was ready to give up. IRCĪt this point I was about 2 weeks deep into this problem. I spent about a week just replacing files with older ones and hope those would work. A good portion of the device initialization code was rewritten in that time, which did not make the search any easier. Now having a rough outline of when this issue was introduced, I loaded the NetBSD repo into Bootlin’s Elixir, searched for the files that changed in that months, and came back empty handed. Finding that out was more annoying than expected, since some of the NetBSD archive mirrors were down for Europe. The result? NetBSD 6.1.3 and older boot up, NetBSD 7.0 and newer do not (which doesn’t really make sense since the bug report talks about version 5.1). I tried some other NetBSD versions, just to make sure this wasn’t a different, more recent bug. The bad news? It was opened in 2010, and the only update links to a tweet from 2018 stating that this still isn’t fixed. The helpful NetBSD Problem Report #43575 describes the exact problem I’m having right now. And that was true, I wasn’t, there was a single mention of the same bug out there. I cannot be the only one with this problem. My initial though was: Let’s check Google. Serial console? VGA? Such a word could mean almost anything Online Search Mind you, at this point I didn’t even had a clue what they meant with console. This helpful comments tells us to just check elsewhere in the architecture specific code. If ( cndev = NODEV ) #endif /* NNULLCONS > 0 */ In fact, the Bochs version this research project relies on prints the following on startup: My first thought was “Well that sure is some incompatibility between a current NetBSD version and a decade-old forked Bochs”. Yes the screenshot was taken over SSH X11 forwarding since the wonderful custom emulator is very particular on what OS it wants to run on.Īs you can see, there is a kernel panic, stemming from a strange error message regarding missing console devices. The initial attempt - just booting the - went like this: That already worked with Linux 5.4 and FreeBSD 12.3, so why shouldn’t it work with NetBSD 9.3? PrequelĪs already stated, my initial goal was to run a recent NetBSD version, 9.3 (released ) in my case, on a customised forked Bochs version (for some low-level analysis further on). I have to run NetBSD on a forked Bochs version as a prerequisite of my master’s thesis.
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