[9fans] booting problems with 3rd ed.

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

This weekend I tried booting up the 3rd edition on two systems that
used to run the 2nd edition.  I'm unable to get either one up to the
point where it tries to start rio. One of them, the auth server, simply
pauses after device probe.  The other, my former file server, panics.
Both systems currently have OpenBSD installed (using all disk space). And
I've executed a bunch of bytebench and lmbench runs to stress test the CPU,
memory, file, and net i/o.  So I think the hardware is still solid. Of
course, the problem could be Plan 9 being much more sensitive to something
in the mainboards or CPUs. =(

The two systems, as I stated above, ran 2ed Plan 9 without any trouble.
Only two things have changed with the systems since then: 1) both systems
now have Intel PRO/100+ ethernet cards (the chips and OpenBSD indicate
they are i82557 cards) instead of the old 3com 3c509 combo cards. 2) both
systems are using different video cards. For the auth server, I swapped
out the 512k no-name card for an ATI Mach64 GU card. For the file server,
I stuck in the S3 Trio/64 that I used to have in my 2ed Plan 9 terminal.


My former Plan 9 auth/cpu server doesn't get past the device probe. The
details are in

  http://highwire.stanford.edu/~jimr/plan9/pensito.9disk.9fd

This machine has an ASUS P2B BX single-processor motherboard with a
400MHz PII.  It has 256 megs of ECC ram. The disks are a 2 gig IDE and
an ATAPI CD-ROM.  Detailed information from the OpenBSD dmesg is at the
end of the file.


My former Plan 9 file server gets further, but then panics. The full
details are in the page

  http://highwire.stanford.edu/~jimr/plan9/spensa.9disk.9fd

The hex numbers printed out at the panic seem to be different each time.

This one is using a Tyan Tiger LX multi-processor motherboard with
one 233MHz PII. It has 128 megs of non-ECC ram, an NCR53c875 "Diamond
Fireport" scsi card, and a 9 gig scsi. In addition, it has a 2gig IDE
drive.  Detailed information from the OpenBSD dmesg is at the end of
the file.

I was hoping maybe some of the good folks here could suggest possible
reasons for such odd behaviour.  I've scanned through the last 187
messages from Jim and Russ, but nothing clicked as possibly being the
same problem. =(


Jim