First post, by GemCookie
After a disappointing experience with Linux on my K6-2 build, I thought I'd give OpenBSD a shot. I heard it had solid support for older hardware; I had also tried it a few times in the past, both on real hardware and in VMs, and concluded it was fine.
Sure enough, I installed it, then got X11 and Lynx running without any major issues. From there, the OS made it onto three of my newer PCs. I tried to actually use it, and that's where the show-stopping issues cropped up.
- If I start QEMU with 512 MiB of RAM allocated to the virtual machine, it crashes with the text "qemu-system-x86_64: cannot set up guest memory 'pc.ram': Cannot allocate memory". Most forum threads on this issue provide the unhelpful suggestion to "install more RAM"; however, QEMU crashes regardless of how much RAM is on the host. Here are the first few lines of top on one of the affected systems:
I clearly have more than enough RAM to start a virtual machine.
load averages: 1.70, 0.98, 0.43 gemcookie.my.domain 08:19:22
49 processes: 48 idle, 1 on processor up 0 days 00:03:19
CPU0: 7.2% user, 0.0% nice, 3.4% sys, 0.4% spin, 1.0% intr, 88.0% idle
CPU1: 7.4% user, 0.0% nice, 3.0% sys, 0.4% spin, 0.0% intr, 89.2% idle
Memory: Real: 401M/2263M act/tot Free: 13G Cache: 1090M Swap: 0K/4339M
Another suggestion involves writing a value to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. This isn't an option, since OpenBSD has no /proc directory!
I can confirm this issue on two machines running OpenBSD/amd64 7.6 and one running OpenBSD/i386 7.3. - I can't get any acceleration out of my Quadro FX 2700M, even though the nv driver should support it. I ran Xorg -configure in an effort to rectify this, only to get a nonsensical error message:
...
c2d-openbsd$ Xorg -configure
Unrecognized option: -configure
use: X [:<display>] [option]
...-configure probe for devices and write an xorg.conf
Fatal server error:
(EE) Unrecognized option: -configure
(EE)
(EE)
- valgrind crashes hard on startup.
I can confirm this issue on two machines running OpenBSD/amd64 7.6.
memcheck-amd64-openbsd[83754]: pinsyscalls addr 3806a478 code 20, pinoff 0xffffffff (pin 0 0-0 0) (libcpin 0 0-0 0) error 78
Abort trap
Any ideas as to what could be wrong? I might be running out of non-Windows operating systems to play with. Linux isn't looking much better, with the nouveau driver causing segmentation faults on pre-unified shader cards.
Gigabyte GA-8I915P Duo Pro | P4 530J | GF 6600 | 2GiB | 120G HDD | 2k/Vista/10
MSI MS-5169 | K6-2/350 | TNT2 M64 | 384MiB | 120G HDD | DR-/MS-DOS/NT/2k/XP/Ubuntu
Dell Precision M6400 | C2D T9600 | FX 2700M | 16GiB | 128G SSD | 2k/Vista/11/Arch/OBSD