Shalom,

' just subscribed to this list.

My system is:

   MVME 147 S-1,   4 MBytes of RAM
   connected to the network at TAU (halos9.tau.ac.il),
   currently running OS9 2.4, from a 250MByte SCSI disk

It is used for a data acquisition system, controlling HV power supplies, 
reading stuff via RS232 from some NIM modules, and from some VME TDCs, 
ADCs, etc.

The system will eventually be replaced by a Power-PC board, with LynxOS, 
when real-time becomes important. Until then, I'd like to run a Unix-like 
OS on it, to have a proper ANSI-C compiler, and so on.  The Linux port is 
not yet readdy to do that.

Questions:

  1.  Will NetBSD do the job,  is it difficult to write drivers to access 
      the hardware?

  2.  Is it possible to boot the NetBSD kernel with the EPROM that comes 
      with OS9?  OS9 boots nicely via bootp/tftp.  Does NetBSD run 
      without the original Motorola EPROMs?

If the answer to both questions is YES, I'd give it a try.  In that case, 
I can keep the system as it is,  and boot either OS9 from the disk, or 
NetBSD from the net.  Switching EPROMS all the time is not an acceptable 
solution.

Stephan

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Stephan B"ottcher                       FAX: +972-3-640-7932
School of Physics and Astronomy         Tel: +972-3-640-7722
High Energy Physics Department            or           -8240
Tel Aviv University                   Email: stephan@alzt.tau.ac.il
69978 Tel Aviv                            or boettcher@desy.de
Israel                   WWW:  http://zow00.desy.de:8000/~stephan/home.html
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