On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, Chuck McManis wrote:

> This is a weird question, but I just built a new booter and tried it out to
> make sure it worked (it did) and that got me thinking that really I could
> build what ever I wanted and have it "boot" into the VAX. That means one
> could presumably load and execute a program that needed only the CPU, some
> memory, and a working network interface to load a program. 
> 
> Has anyone written any sorts of tests/diagnostics for various cards? I've
> got a few Memory cards that are questionable so I thought I could write a
> walking ones and zeroes test, and of course there is the Sigma disk card
> that I want to exercise with the MSCP protocol. 

You might check out the mop images NETTEST.SYS and NETTESTA.SYS under
ftp://ftp.stacken.kth.se/pub/OS/NetBSD/mopd/.  I guess they sort of
qualify as diagnostics in a very minimal sense.

You're looking to boot some arbitrary binary from the root filesystem. It
should be completely possible.  I mean, the netbsd kernel is just program
afterall.  You'll want your program to be statically compiled, and not
dependent on any operating system calls.  The kernel is a great example of
this :-)

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
CHESS IS A FUN SPORT WHEN PLAYED WITH SHOTGUNS.  -- MegaHAL.
http://ciips.ee.uwa.edu.au/~hutch/hal/HAL/