Hi,

I grabbed the sys/vax subtree of Net/2 and see that most of the uvaxII drivers
(except for the dhv11) are there, but almost none of stand subtree for
bootstrapping. This may sound like blasphemy, but I would like to
suggest that we look for a simpler booting solution, since I remember what a
pain it was writing and maintaining those stand alone device drivers (especially
the tape stuff that went in the tp format tape boot:-).

For the uvaxen, all you need to do is put the file in contiguous disk space
and put the boot block into lbn 0 that points to it and the console "boot"
command does the rest. If there was a couple of megs of the disk reserved for
this, you could stick a stripped and beheaded vmunix right in there and avoid
the standalone stuff all together. The only problem I see with doing this is
that there would be no way to boot an alternate "vmunix" off of the same drive.

I don't remember much about the older vaxen, except that they could load an
imagine off of the console media. I suspect that a "vmunix" is too large to
stick right on the console media, but a simple primary boot program that
loaded sequential blocks off of a disk would be simpler than one that knows
the ufs file system (and usable with any file system format).

A related thought is that, maybe, a boot program could be built around the
"real" device drivers, autoconf and buss routines, avoiding the need to
build separate stand alone device drivers, etc.

Any other thoughts on this, rick
ps: I have some time and since the uvax drivers are available to me, I might
    be able to help getting it to the single user prompt by avoiding the
    massbus driver hassles. If you think I can help, just let me know.

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