On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Simon Burge wrote:

> Mats O Jansson wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, Matthew Hudson wrote:
> > 
> > > Okay. All I know is I put the bootloader in /tftpboot/mop
> > > and it works. I think you should ask in port-vax. They
> > > know there way around mop. I was gonna try to tackle mop
> > > on the decsystem, but someone has to be much more qualified
> > > than me. All I want right now is for this system to boot. :)
> > 
> > I have had plans for adding support for pmax (and alpha). But never had
> > the need. ECOFF is only slightly harder than a.out. ELF is worse.
> 
> Basic ELF (just text and data) isn't that hard to do.  Have a look at
> the first stage pmax bootblocks in sys/arch/pmax/stand/scsiboot/bootxx.c
> - the loadfile() function is what you want.

I'll do that...

>                                             I've not yet really looked
> at the mopd stuff yet, so I don't know how easy it is to graft in...

The way a.out support was added in 2.5.x is a kludge. It should be moved
out to a separate file (and a corresponding for ecoff and elf). I have
already been done in a unreleased version of mopd.

> > But I think the file handling code must be totaly rewritten. Why?
> > Simply since most people seems to be using linux for mop loading.
> > The code must be rewritten in a way so it is possible to handle
> > the different file formats without the need of system header files.
> 
> If you have a mop package external to that supplied NetBSD, you
> could try just throughing the relevent NetBSD headers files into the
> distribution.

Yes, something like that...

> > So, since I wrote it, I think I can answer most questions.
> 
> Do you prefer questions to you or cross-posted to port-vax?

I have no preference :-)
 
> Simon.

-moj