Leo Bicknell wrote:
 
> 	Anyway, I know a lot has changed recently, can someone
> summarize the netboot procedure, and what's broken with a
> netboot 5000/25 kernel?  I'd love to work on this if I can
> be brought up to speed.

Apparently there are no further problems tftpbooting DS5000/xx.

Your right about the developments.  It would now appear that
tftpbooting is the preferred installation method, as opposed to
the exception for (nearly all?) machines.  Hence the installation
instrutions at http://www.NetBSD.ORG/Ports/pmax/pmax-install.html
are slightly dated:

: Eventually we would like to support installation of NetBSD/pmax
: by booting NetBSD on a target machine across the network.
: This defers all the problems with bootblocks and labelling
: disks until you actually have NetBSD up and running on the
: target machine. The target machine boots as if it were
: diskless, and can then install NetBSD onto its local target disk.
:
: However, NetBSD/pmax doesn't yet boot diskless on all
: machines, so this isn't a generally-available option. If you wish
: to pursue it, see the NetBSD diskless 8 manual page and
: the pmax diskless boot configuration instructions. 

A second stage boot loader still sounds good though, if you
are going run diskless.

Regards,
Greg

-- 
Gregory McGarry
Signal Processing Research Centre
School of Electrical and Electronic Systems Engineering
Queensland University of Technology, Australia