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  • COHERENT 4.2.14 distribution disks available

    From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 5 07:40:47 2020
    Many web sites nowadays claim that 4.2.10 was the last COHERENT version.
    This is wrong, there was 4.2.12 and 4.2.14. I do not have 4.2.12 disks,
    because back then I had all sources needed to build a 4.2.12 system from
    a 4.2.10 distribution. Nowadays you can do that too with everything open sourced.

    In 4.2.14 there were so many changes that one really needs a complete distribution. I found time to fiddle (don't ask) with 25 year old floppy disks and got
    them imaged. The 4.2.14 distributions disks are available at:

    https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/distrib/Coherent-4.2.14/

    I have installed the base system on Virtualbox and it's working stable and solid.
    When I have spare time I'll also install the DDK and the 4.2.14 kernel sources on the box, to see how and if the stuff works.

    Anyway, you can install and examine the distribution your self :-)

    Have fun,
    Udo

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 5 09:37:05 2020
    Installed the 4.2.14 DDK, the kernel build with the DDK has same size as the kernel included on the installation disks and also works OK. Good, so at
    least working driver sources for this release.

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 5 10:17:39 2020
    Put kernel 4.2.14 source from Steve's archive on 4.2.14 box, build kernel from source.

    Works :)

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 5 11:31:03 2020
    Screenshot is here: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/news.html

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  • From John McCue@21:1/5 to Udo Munk on Mon Oct 5 19:47:47 2020
    Udo Munk <udo.munk@freenet.de> wrote:
    Many web sites nowadays claim that 4.2.10 was the last
    COHERENT version. This is wrong, there was 4.2.12 and
    4.2.14. I do not have 4.2.12 disks, because back then I had
    all sources needed to build a 4.2.12 system from a 4.2.10
    distribution. Nowadays you can do that too with everything
    open sourced.

    In 4.2.14 there were so many changes that one really needs a
    complete distribution. I found time to fiddle (don't ask)
    with 25 year old floppy disks and got > them imaged. The
    4.2.14 distributions disks are available at: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/distrib/Coherent-4.2.14/

    I have installed the base system on Virtualbox and it's
    working stable and solid. When I have spare time I'll also
    install the DDK and the 4.2.14 kernel sources on the box, to
    see how and if the stuff works.

    Anyway, you can install and examine the distribution your self :-)

    Thanks, just dounloaded and will give it a try

    Have fun,
    Udo

    John

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Tue Oct 6 03:02:50 2020
    Couldn't remember anymore if MWC/RTR X11 works with 4.2.14. So installed the PS/2
    mouse driver in DDK and kernel source kit, build kernels with the driver included.

    Then I installed X11 from the distribution disks, the post installation needs a simple
    hack to avoid a problem with finding a mouse. But after installation the X server
    works OK on 4.2.14.

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  • From frasc@21:1/5 to All on Tue Oct 6 08:24:38 2020
    Thanks Udo! You rock :-)

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Sun Oct 11 08:09:52 2020
    The device driver for IDE hard disks has bugs in 4.2.14. The source for the AT driver
    that corrects one of the bugs is available here:

    https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/distrib/Coherent-4.2.14/patches/

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  • From John McCue@21:1/5 to Udo Munk on Sun Oct 11 16:11:26 2020
    Udo Munk <udo.munk@freenet.de> wrote:
    The device driver for IDE hard disks has bugs in 4.2.14. The source
    for the AT driver that corrects one of the bugs is available here:

    https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/distrib/Coherent-4.2.14/patches/


    I have not noticed any issues with 4.2.14.
    But how would I apply the patch ?

    Thanks
    John

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to John McCue on Sun Oct 11 09:33:28 2020
    On Sunday, October 11, 2020 at 6:11:27 PM UTC+2, John McCue wrote:

    I have not noticed any issues with 4.2.14.
    But how would I apply the patch ?

    Thanks
    John

    Connect a second IDE harddisk to the system and try to boot that.

    Install the DDK. Now you have driver sources in /etc/conf, the at.c source is /etc/conf/at/src/at.c. Rename the file to at.c.4214, then copy the corrected version to there. Execute:

    make clean
    make
    /etc/conf/bin/idmkcoh -o /coh.test

    Reboot system and boot the coh.test kernel, problem gone.

    If you use the full kernel source kit you need to repair it there too.

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  • From John McCue@21:1/5 to Udo Munk on Sun Oct 11 21:10:39 2020
    Udo Munk <udo.munk@freenet.de> wrote:
    On Sunday, October 11, 2020 at 6:11:27 PM UTC+2, John McCue wrote:

    [snip]

    If you use the full kernel source kit you need to repair it there too.

    Thanks for your help,
    John

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 12 04:29:12 2020
    There is another problem somewhere, if you try to fsck the second hd the kernel will panic.
    I suspected the IDE disk driver, but even on close inspection the fixed version looks good to me.

    Then I tried the same with the IDE driver from r12, no problem. Do not do this if
    you are not a kernel developer! I use cloned VM's for such things, just to have a look and
    get an idea and then throw away such clones.

    Then I copied the fsck sources from the 4.2.10 box to the 4.2.14 one, build fsck
    from source and tried that, also no problem anymore. You can use this as a workaround
    in case you need to repair filesystem on the second HD.

    The 4.2.14 fsck binary is larger that the one build from the sources, the latest sources
    I found are from 1993, I'm sure there were changes after this.

    I have tortured both HD's with iozone, copied huge directories forth and back, ran large
    build stuff, all rock solid. This problem will not be easy to locate and only can be reproduced
    with the fsck binary from r14 so far.

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 12 07:57:51 2020
    I have narrowed this down some further:

    With QEMU 5.1 you can fsck.r14 /dev/at1a as well as /dev/rat1a as much as you want, solid.
    With Virtualbox 6.0.20 you can fsck.r14 /dev/at1a as much as you want, but not /dev/rat1a.
    PCem v16 same.

    These are IDE controllers and drives from different vendors, same as we had with real
    hardware way back then. To me it looks like that some of the hardware provided to
    the guest machines does some things in a way unexpected and unnoticed by the AT driver,
    which results in a kernel page fault.

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 12 11:49:59 2020
    With the above dd one also kills the system running on QEMU.
    The at driver is OK, this is a bug somewhere in the filesystem dealing
    with raw disk devices.

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 12 11:43:07 2020
    Problem always happens if reading lots of data from a raw disk device and update
    wants to sync the disks. So I tried:

    dd if=/dev/rat1a of=/tmp/dump bs=512 count=80000

    Sure thing, in the moment update tries to sync this also results in a kernel page fault.

    Avoid using a raw disk device if you don't have to.

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  • From John McCue@21:1/5 to Udo Munk on Tue Oct 13 18:25:59 2020
    Udo Munk <udo.munk@freenet.de> wrote:
    There is another problem somewhere, if you try to fsck the second hd
    the kernel will panic. I suspected the IDE disk driver, but even on
    close inspection the fixed version looks good to me.

    Then I tried the same with the IDE driver from r12, no problem. Do not
    do this if you are not a kernel developer! I use cloned VM's for such
    things, just to have a look and get an idea and then throw away such
    clones.

    I am not a kernel developer, but if I think I need
    to apply the patch I will use a clone. So far I
    have not noticed anything in Virtual Box.

    [snip]

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to John McCue on Tue Oct 13 12:07:28 2020
    On Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 8:26:01 PM UTC+2, John McCue wrote:
    I am not a kernel developer, but if I think I need
    to apply the patch I will use a clone. So far I
    have not noticed anything in Virtual Box.

    Using the patch is not a problem, I meant using a 4.2.12 device driver with the 4.2.14
    kernel. This likely will cause problems and things like this should be done with a test
    system only.

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Tue Oct 20 07:05:34 2020
    Glad to hear that John, enjoy the system.

    Udo

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  • From John McCue@21:1/5 to Udo Munk on Tue Oct 20 13:55:56 2020
    Udo Munk <udo.munk@freenet.de> wrote:
    Problem always happens if reading lots of data from a raw
    disk device and update wants to sync the disks. So I tried:

    dd if=/dev/rat1a of=/tmp/dump bs=512 count=80000

    Sure thing, in the moment update tries to sync this also results in a
    kernel page fault.

    Avoid using a raw disk device if you don't have to.

    Hi Udo

    Thanks for the info, on the VM I really have no need to use
    the raw disk device, but will try and avoid that should a
    case comes up were I need to.

    But so faar so good with 4.2.14

    John

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