On Tue, 12 Sep 1995 11:58:19 -0500 (CDT) 
 Brian Oneill <btoneill@member.com> wrote:

 > Let me see if I understand this correctly, with what you are working on, 
 > i could hook up my machine to a network, and boot off of say my linux 
 > machine, and it would format my HD and create the miniroot, so that my 
 > system would then be able to boot on its own?

That's the general idea, yah.

I have never tried booting an hp300 from a Linux box.  It will, however, 
require that your Linux system have a working `rbootd', `rarpd', and 
`rpc.bootparamd'.  For rbootd to work, you'll need a bpf.

I just committed some changes to rbootd to make it go in Littles, but 
I've been notified since then that some of the changes apparently slipped 
through the cracks ... I hope to have that resolved as soon as possible.

Note that I've not actually coded the network install stuff yet.  Indeed, 
I still have a few more design issues to think about .. namely, swapping 
while running from the miniroot (and I think ragge is thinking about this 
for the VAX, too).  This isn't really an issue unless you have < 8mb RAM, 
which includes every 320 at least; AFAIK, there's only backplane space 
for 7.5mb in those puppies.

I've thought about just configuring the miniroot kernel as `swap vnd0c' 
... Initially, the swap code will get an ENXIO, and report "warning: no 
swap space found", but continue to come up into single-user, at which 
time the installation stuff could do a `vnconfig' and a `swapon'.  Then, 
to solve the problem, you only need to include a decent-sized file to 
configure as `vnd0c' in the miniroot image.  Note, I haven't tested this 
yet; I need to write SYS_NINST first, which will essentially be loaded 
via the network, rarp, bootparam to get `root' (which will just be a 
directory with a miniroot image in it), label the disk, copy the miniroot 
image to partition b, and then load the kernel from it.  Just a SMOP, as 
far as I can see...

I basically want to do the same thing with tapes, but, alas, my tape 
drive is currently unhappy, and I need to find a place to get the 
`backwards' HP-formatted tapes.

If anyone else has other suggestions, I'd certainly like to hear them!  :-)

 > Also, their something i do in the bios to tell it to look on a network 
 > for a boothost? 

Well, during self-check you can just tap the spacebar to bing up a list of 
boot choices, and can select via a menu.  On some systems, you can 
`save' this choice in the EEPROM.  On my 319 (with a Rev C1 ROM, I 
believe), I have no disks attached, and it just defaults to the LAN device.

 > Please excuse my ignorance of HP machines, I'm new at them.

No worries :-)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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