Re: Laptop won't boot -CURRENT after 8/04

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 16:01 -0500, Kris Maglione wrote:
> I am in the process of narrowing down the exact date that it stops 
> booting, but my laptop won't boot any stable past an early BETA of 5.3 
> and it won't boot with -CURRENT from sometime in late 8/04. The latest 
> date I tried was 1/14/05, I believe. The boot stops after detecting acd0 
> (cdrw/dvd-rom). In verbose mode, it stops at:
> GEOM: Configure ad0s1 start ... length ... end ...
> GEOM: Configure ad0s2[a-f] start ... length ... end ...
> 
> The laptop doesn't have a serial port, and I've been testing with a 
> FreesBIE CD, since the laptop has a slow HD, so I can't post the entire 
> dmesg, though I can type out anything important.

Hanging here often relates to floppy drive or floppy disk related
issues.  Late August corresponds to the GEOMification of the floppy
device.

Try setting debug.fdc.debugflags=255 from the loader, then posting the
bits of the dmesg relating to the floppy drive.  If it looks like it is
getting stuck in the floppy probe, try applying the patch at
http://www.devrandom.co.uk/freebsd/fdc_debug.c to an up-to-date current
tree and replying with the output.

> Can someone post an easy way to find all CVS changes between two dates? 
> That would be extremely helpful in narrowing the source of the problem.

It's quite easy if you have a local CVS repository. (It should also be
possible against the FreeBSD anoncvs server).

Something like the following:

cd /var/tmp
cvs co src/sys
cvs -q diff -u -D 2003-10-20 -D 2003-11-20 src/sys

Will check out the current source then compare all files within src/sys
between October 20th and November 20th.

Gavin