Hi, Nick Hudson wrote:
On 10/13/15 14:05, Riccardo Mottola wrote:Hi all, how is the port status? how does NetBSD work on a 715 class machine?I have a 715/50 and it works. Which model do you have?
me too! trusty 715 "first gen" with the older CPU and larger heatsing and classic keyboard connector. I am very fond of this computer, so I want to get it back running. This run gentoo linux for a long time, although Linux grew more and more RAM hungry and eventually my HDD broke physically. I thought this as a NetBSD target
I would also have a newer 715, bought for quite some money back then when , 64Mhz which is slightly different. This machine still has HP-UX 10.20 which is a very fine OS, but it is becoming more and more difficult to compile current programs on it, so I thought replacing it with OpenBSD
Please report any problems you find :)
The first issues are getting the computer back in shape: I "borrowed" a CD drive from a Sun: working SCSI CD-ROMs are rare! Also the HDD is an issue. The 50pin drives I haev around are small and old, like 1G. I then have two Wide drives and tww adapters. Only one 68->50 pin seems to work and only one of the two drives gets recognized: sadly the "old" one, the other is new-old-stock I had. I remember the SCSI bus being tricky, but...
I tested CD boot a long time ago, but it should still work.
Sadly, it doesn't. Once I got the scsi bus "working" I burned the NetBSD 7 image, but boot aborts quickly with an exception and a couple of HEX dump lines.. Just to try out, I tried the OpenBSD CD and get the same issue. Before thinking that the hardware got unreliable, I found the old Linux install cd (2008 vintage) and that one Boots! This means the CD drive is capable of booting, but both OpenBSD and NetBSD images are in an unsuitable format.
Last thing, The disk fried was "root", but I still had the original mighty 525MB HP drive with "boot" and "swap": the computer still boots that kernel and gets up to the point of looking for root, another proof that the hardware is still good enough.
If you still have a CD drive, could you test our images? Else, the only path I see is fiddling with rbootp and other things...
Riccardo