I managed to install NetBSD/pmax 1.1 on a DECstation 5000/240 just before 
Christmas. Since I have a few minutes now, I'll send in some of the notes and 
gotchas I have left over. The system has been running with a serial console 
for about 7 days now, running an old benchmark suite in a loop to try and 
exercise the system a bit. Hasn't burped once.

This narrative is a bit long. You can skip to the points/suggestions at the 
end if you like. The wordy part is intended for those who, like me, were 
reduced to scouring the list archives for clues...


At first I tried to use NetBSD/i386 as my "helper machine." This just flat out 
didn't work, which was rather disappointing - I'm not sure if this was a 
simple byte-sex problem, I got hung up for several days in between because I 
decided to upgrade the PC to 1.1, had forgotten the tricks (don't get cute and 
try to align on cylinder boundaries when installing with DOS), and couldn't 
find an FAQ anywhere. But I digress... Neither NetBSD/i386 1.0 or 1.1 seemed 
to work with the default disk tools, but I could well have been doing 
something else that wouldn't work.

I scratched up a second disk and borrowed an Ultrix distribution. Ultrix 4.2a 
is what would boot with this non-DEC CD-ROM, so that's what I installed. Using 
the Ultrix version of disklabel worked fine.

The only miniroot that really supported a serial console was the one that 
lacked mount_ffs... Since it *would* mount NFS volumes even though root (/) 
was mounted read-only, I was able to access a copy of mount_ffs I unpacked on 
a Sun.

When I got around this I started trying to set up the first disk with a useful 
partition table and such. The NetBSD disklabel program seemed to completely 
refuse to install values different from those in the Ultrix partition table. I 
reformatted the disk on a Sun to try to get around this, but the Sun slapped 
on a SunOS partition table and I had the same problem. I made the SunOS 
partition table what I really wanted, gave disklabel an identical table, and 
everything was happy.



Notes/Suggestions:

. Versions of disklabel are needed for other common platforms,
  e.g. NetBSD/*, SunOS, etc.

. disklabel or another tool should be able to remove the Ultrix/SunOS
  partition table completely, or at least edit it.

. New miniroot (this has been taken care of).

. NetBSD/i386 has a ton of installation/configuration scripts. Should be
  possible to adapt them to NetBSD/pmax.

. Installation docs should have a step-by-step portion with whole command
  line examples.

. My 5000/240 PROM doesn't support booting from a partition, but the
  installation notes suggest it will. Most likely just my version, but a
  note would be nice.

. System exerciser or acceptance tests? If I clean up this benchmark package
  and if it's allowed by the copyright, folks can have something to shake
  out new kernels/releases. Maybe someone else has a package they already
  use...


And of course, since I'm the one making noise about this stuff I'm hereby 
nominated to fix some of them ;^)  Jonathan holds a copyright on the 
installation instructions so I'll forward any drafts to him. Who should get 
changes for disklabel, or the code for another tool? Likewise, any changes or 
additions of installation/configuration scripts?

I'm not sure what my level of involvement can be regarding -current. I'm 
interested in using the 3max+ as a stable compute/file server, and I don't at 
present have a crash & burn machine. If someone wants to take this to EMail, 
feel free.

BTW, thanks to everyone involved for bringing this excellent OS to the decmips 
platform!

--Steve.

Steve Jones                   smj@Crash.COM                Manhattan, New York
CRASH!! Computing     http://www.crash.com/smj.html   Cambridge, Massachusetts
                     PGP key available via home page