Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 23:54:52 +0100 From: No Spam <sopwith!nospam@parsely.rain.com> To: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Subject: Problems with FreeBSD 3.1 on Alpha Message-ID: <199904190654.GAA13992@sopwith.UUCP>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[ This is longer than I'd intended, and a bit of a rant
in places. If you can overlook that, it is intended to be
constructive, there are real problems reported, real
questions asked, and real suggestions offered. ]
I've been working on installing FreeBSD-3.1 on an Alpha.
This is my first experience with FreeBSD. I was expecting
things to be slightly different from NetBSD/Alpha (which I've
been running for years with almost no problems), but not
massively different in the way that sysV or linux would be.
The FreeBSD/Alpha installation has, shall we say,
room for improvement.
The install-program-jail on the floppy provides 4 choices
for a terminal type. The last time I looked my termcap
files had a lot more entries than that.
I suggest dropping the annoying screen oriented interface
and using a plain, dumb scrolling interface. This would
be usable on nearly all terminals, it would be faster, and
would save room on the floppy. Getting this down to a single
floppy would be a significant improvement, especially for
sites where the console and floppy drive are not in the same
room. (Given how many times one boots from floppy before
deciding that there is no way to successfully install using
the install-program-jail program and switches to installing
by hand from another flavor of Unix.) I was thinking about
getting the CD, but from reading mail on the website it appears
that the CD isn't bootable.
The install-program-jail appears to repaint the screen at
every level as it goes bouncing automagically thru the menus.
This is slow and adds to the frustration level.
The "emergency holographic shell" menu item does nothing but
repaint the screen. A shell would be a useful feature when
attempting to do the install. An all-singing-all-dancing
install-program-jail cannot anticipate every need of
every site doing an installation. If I wanted to use
bloated, buggy, we-know-better-than-you programs there
is always wintel.
As just one example, the program provides an option
for getting the distribution files from disk.
But I found no way to mount a disk partition from
within the install-program-jail.
After much dinking around, rebooting, etc. I finally
got the thing to attempt to install via ftp. It
does about 12 MB worth of bin and declares /mnt
to be full and gives up. Even doing a custom
partition with well over 900 MB doesn't help, it
still fills up after 12 MB. Since there is no
shell access there is no way to try and figure out
what is going on.
Including a port number in a url is not the same as
pointing ftp at a proxy.
So I boot another flavor of Unix, install a disklabel,
newfs partions, hack FreeBSD's very non-portable
disklabel program and install FreeBSD's bootstrap,
untar the distributions, and....will not boot.
Not trusting the ported disklabel program, I tried
bootstraps from other various other flavors of Unix.
NetBSD's will boot FreeBSD. Okay, it boots, sort of.
But many things are not working. Track this down to
incorrect major/minor number in /dev. Modify MAKEDEV
to convert the major/minor numbers so they will come out right.
Okay, it finally boots and is somewhat usable. fsck is
still unhappy. Plug in another disk and have FreeBSD do
native newfs, disklabel and such. Ah, somewhat happier
now.
Speaking of fsck:
# newfs -O /dev/rda0e
/dev/rda0e: 81920 sectors in 20 cylinders of 1 tracks, 4096 sectors
40.0MB in 2 cyl groups (16 c/g, 32.00MB/g, 5056 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
32, 65568,
# fsck -p -f /dev/rda0e
/dev/rda0e: DIRECTORY CORRUPTED I=2 OWNER=root MODE=40755
/dev/rda0e: SIZE=512 MTIME=Apr 17 22:31 1999
/dev/rda0e: DIR=/
/dev/rda0e: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
#
It might be nice if fsck supported the -O flag of newfs.
From the fsck man page:
> Filesystems are marked clean when they are unmounted, when they have been
> mounted read-only
Uh, mounting a filesystem read-only does not clean it.
From the fine documentation:
> The easiest way to do
> this is by running /stand/sysinstall
...which is missing
> The first keyword is machine, which, since FreeBSD only runs on
> Intel 386 and compatible chips, is i386.
It seems to sorta run on the Alpha, assuming you can get it
installed. There are many many other places where the
documentation ass-u-mes that all the world is a pee-cee.
In addition to the missing /stand/sysinstall there is
no /etc/rc.conf. Where is one supposed to get this file?
And what else is missing or otherwise wrong?
It appears that FreeBSD is not LP64 clean:
pid 129 (sendmail): unaligned access: va=0x16054d4b9 pc=0x12002498c ra=0x1200248e0 op=ldl
Building a kernel generated 138 compiler warnings, some of
which are minor, but others may be serious problems. Haven't
had time to inspect the code yet. LP64 bugs in the kernel don't
give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about using FreeBSD for production.
Neither does having to use the reset switch to get the kernel out
of an infinite loop. Still responded to ping, but that's about it.
Snoopy
snoopy percent sopwith dot uucp at qiclab dot scn dot rain dot com
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199904190654.GAA13992>