Re: VS2000 + NetBSD

[Holm Tiffe <holm%freibergnet.de@localhost>]

[..]
> > 
> > I don't even know if the VS2000 is able to boot from that SCSI disk, is
> > that possible or is an RDxx MFM disk necessary?
> 
> It's possible with a firmware patch. Not sure if it's possible to update 
> it without an eprom-burner, though.
> 
> You find more here: ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/vms/pk2k/
> 
> Completely offtopic: Has someone compiled the driver there to work with 
> OpenVMS 7.3?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Lukas
> 

It seems, that my friend already has installed those Firmware patches,
there is a cord with a connected switch soldered somewhere on the
mainboard, that switches the firmware between KA410 1.2A and 2.3 W.
I can enter B DKA0 on the chevron prompt and after a short time
the access-LED on the SCSI Disk lights up for a short time, but after
that I get some boot error on the VS.

I've tried all available bootstrap codes from /usr/mdec on NetBSD 1.5.3
w/o much luck so far.

Wolfgang J. Moeller that wrote the patches mentioned here

http://home.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/vax/vs-scsi.html

..that the VS2000 ist using the same SCSI Hardware as the VS3100
Machines, but has an smaller DMA Buffer (16K instead of 128K).

I've netbooted the vs2000 and installed the SCSI Disk (sd0) from there,
that worked flawlessly so far. I haven't tried to boot the installed Disk
on my VS3100 M76 but I'm pretty sure that it boot, will try that next.

As far as I know 1.5.3 was a pretty good and stable system and my
personally experiences with newer variants on Vaxstation where ..ehem...
lets say "suboptimal". Are there any reasons to check newer Releases
specially on an VS2000? Are there changes in the bootcode besides of
a.out vs. elf bootfiles? (had to hack FreeBSDs mopd (mopcopy) in the past,
don't know if the actual port works..)

Any hints?

Regards,

Holm



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