> Absolutely nothing is wrong, this'd be wonderful. But is it at all
> doable right now with the current state of the pmax port? And the
> bootblock is still an issue, of course.

Mostly, I believe this is doable right now.  The problems with the
port right now have to do with choosing the toolchain strategy and
getting some of the device drivers to work.   The kernel may not
support your configuration, although it probably will.   Jonathan's
got the closest thing to a set of binaries to install right now.
Nobody's really sat down and done a distribution and install script
as I described yet, though, because a lot of the basics haven't been
nailed down yet.

> Well, how does this compare to NetBSD's use of the SunOS filesystem?
> Is there no way to keep this just in the pmax part of the tree?  This is
> curiousity, I haven't spent time perusing the source code to see..

It'd probably be #ifdef ULTRIX_COMPAT somewhere down in sys/ufs/ffs.
This is widely agreed to be ugly.   I think that SunOS works because
it's closer to a 4.3 filesystem than Ultrix, but I'm sure somebody
will jump in and correct me on this if I'm wrong... :')

> This is what led me to think that just supporting the ultrix filesystem
> wouldn't be a lot of work in the first place. But, whatever.

Ultrix does some weird things that weren't done in 4.3BSD.

> Certainly net booting is a fine way to go.  Has anyone tried that?

I was doing that exclusively back when I was hacking on 4.4alpha at
DEC.   However, I wasn't doing anything with a miniroot then - things
were a bit too primitive at that point.   Instead I was doing a
two-stage boot and coming up on an NFS-mounted root.   Made debugging
a lot easier.

Wasn't Jonathan distributing a miniroot kernel for a while there?
Does that boot over the net?

Right now I'm booting with 4.4bsd-a.out-compatible bootblocks for
which I've lost the source.   Sigh.   I think that John has bootblocks
that work on the 3100 with NetBSD a.out.   Again, please correct me if
I'm wrong, Jonathan.   I don't know if his bootblocks work on all
systems - because I've been coming at this from a different direction
than Jonathan, I haven't looked very hard at what he's done. :'(

			       _MelloN_


--
Ted Lemon		      Wells Fargo Bank, Information Protection Division
mellon@ipd.wellsfargo.com					+1 415 477 5045