On Mon, 16 Sep 1996 07:16:32 EST 
 Fletcher Christian <Fletch2@ibm.net> wrote:

 > group has any simularity with any of the other porting efforts then
 > the majority of us were given machines (or bought them cheap) and  
 > are now looking to use them for something usefull. Yet there is no
 > hardware FAQ, or core data of any kind and the little information  
 > around is often confused, (witness the Boot ROM fiasco of the past  
 > week).

When I have time, I try to get info up on the WWW pages ... but, since I 
do NetBSD/hp300 in my spare time (which seems to be in increasingly short 
supply lately...), I can't always collate the info and munge into 
presentable documents ... But, I always try to encourage people to 
help me out in this endeavor whenever possible.

The recent "Boot ROM fiasco" is a weird case in that the documentation 
was just not quite right ... it boiled down to my not knowing that some 
400 ROMs had "Rev A" stamped on them ... (on the sticker only, maybe?  
I've never personally used a 400s or 400t, so I don't know for sure what 
the BOOTROM prints during the self-test, which is really the revision 
number I was referring to in the documentation...)

 > With so much HP stuff becoming landfill I would have thought that  
 > getting hardware information out there would be a priority. Each guy  
 > who realises that it's worth his while to pluck an HP out of a skip is  
 > potentially the Jason Thorpe of the future :-)
 >
 > The unfortunate truth of the matter is that at the moment is isn't worth  
 > anyones time to rescue one of these machines. For a start there is no  
 > way to boot one unless you already have NetBSD working on another  
 > platform. I have a number of computers running a variety of OS's if I  
 > realy look into rbootd and the NET2 code I'm sure I could do  
 > something. The question is should I have to go to all that trouble?

That's not strictly true... Scott Reynolds, Mike Hibler, and I helped a 
fellow netboot from a FreeBSD system ... I'm told that someone netbooted 
from a SunOS system (with the LBL multicast code, which includes bpf).

It would be nice if someone were to do the work to rbootd to make it work 
on non-bpf systems ...

 > I think the problem is that there is a massive difference between the  
 > guys running the porting effort and the first time user. From reading  
 > the group I would say that people like Jason have 2 or 3 different  
 > machines all net capable and at least a working HPUX or 
 > NetBSD machine to boot off. In addition they have several years of  
 > HP experience and are frankly of Guru or SuperGuru status in Unix
 > hacking :-) The way the OS installation is handled is designed for these  
 > people. IF you don't have the capacity to netboot then you are out of  
 > luck.

It is true that I have several systems at home... I'm a bit of a computer 
buff (umm, duh :-) with an affinity for hardware that people consider 
obsolete... (Hey, it still works, right?)  When I started hacking 
NetBSD/hp300, there weren't very many of us (umm, 5?), and we sort of 
relied on whatever we happened to have around (in my case, HP-BSD 1.7).

When I re-wrote the installation tools for NetBSD/hp300 1.1, I tried 
_very hard_ to make them easier for new users ... However, I'm not a new 
user anymore, and as such, I rely on constructive comments from those who 
use the installation tools.  Without that feedback, it's hard for me to 
make them better in that regard.  Paul Kranenburg, Leo Weppleman, Matt 
Green, Gordon Ross, and myself have hacked on them since, but mostly it 
was to make them more sharable... The user interface didn't change much.  
However, I think it's a far cry better than what used to be there (you 
had to have a working HP-UX installation before ... and in the 0.9B 
days, you needed to have a nice fellow like John Brezak e-mail you a 
uuencoded disk image...)

 > The installation notes say that this will be fixed but unfortunately this  
 > has NO priority since the leaders of this effort already have working  
 > systems. I would offer to help, but I can't get the OS on my machine.

Please don't make false assumptions ... The fact is that I _have_ been 
working on making tape booting work.  But, the combination of a flaky 
HP-IB tape drive, a very short supply of usable tapes, and not a lot of 
time to spend on it means that it just hasn't been finished... In the 
post-1.2 sources, I've done a fair bit of work to the boot code (the same 
boot block will net or disk boot, and is _very_ close to tape booting).

 > It's ok adding all this great stuff and I'm sure that things like the 4k
 > page binary compatability are really important to someone but until a  
 > guy can pick up an HP and boot with a tape or a floppy or a CD  
 > without a second host I don't see this port as being viable.

In fact, folks who have been using the hp300 port previously _at all_ 
will really appreciate the 4k binary compatiblity (the hp300 port 
currently uses the 4k binaries, and should have been switched to use the 
8k format _years_ ago... sometimes you just put your foot down and get 
rid of legacy cruft like using an executable format that's the only thing 
stopping you from sharing your executables with every other m68k port).

 > Anyway I have an offer. If people will send me what little hardware  
 > data they have I'll start to compile a hardware FAQ. I'll need help  
 > because I've only seen 2 or 3 of these machines but I'll do all the admin  
 > and compilation and posting. This is all I can donate to the project  
 > because I can't get the damned OS on my machine. Now once we have  
 > some hardware data AND an OS you dont HAVE to netboot I think  
 > we can start making progress.

If you have any machine capable of being an NFS server, and a tape on 
which you can dd SYS_INST, you don't _have_ to netboot, you know.  The 
installation notes mention that you can load the miniroot tool from tape, 
but that it's only capable of reading the miniroot image from an NFS 
server.  If that part of the notes isn't clear enough, _please_ let me 
know so I can update the documentation... (I do try really hard...)

Anyhow, if you're serious about maintaining a NetBSD/hp300 FAQ, I'd love 
to have the assistance.  Let me dig up the bits I've been collecting over 
the years...

 -- save the ancient forests - http://www.bayarea.net/~thorpej/forest/ -- 
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939