Folks,

The new improved two-stage bootblocks for the pmax are pretty much
finished.  I've tested them on a 3100, a 5000/240 and a 5900-260, and
I'm looking for guinea pigs to test other models.  These bootblocks can
boot a.out, ECOFF and ELF format kernels, with ELF being the preferred
format.  Symbol table loading for DDB is supported on all a.out kernels
and new (as of last night's sup) ELF kernels, but it's possible old
a.out kernels won't be able to load symbols (but will still boot) soon
when the backwards-compatible symbol table code gets garbage collected.

One thing to note is that you will need the new bootblocks to use the
upgrade/ramdisk kernel that will come with NetBSD 1.4.  The current
bootblocks are limited to loading a kernel just under 2MB in size, the
the upgrade kernel will be larger than this.

If you want to test them (it's best if you have a spare disk - it's
hard to recover from botched bootblocks!), the source code will
be available after the next sup in the src/sys/arch/pmax/stand
directory.  Binaries can also be obtained from ftp.NetBSD.ORG in
pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/bootblocks/bb2stage.tar.gz now.

The tar file contains /boot, /usr/mdec/bootrz and /usr/mdec/rzboot.
Just grab the tar file, cd to / and extract it.  To build from source,
you'll need to uncomment the SRCS= line in .../stand/Makefile - there's
currently a problem with making symlinks during a "make depend" I
haven't got nutted out yet.  The just "make install".

Once you have done either of the above steps, install the new first
stage boot into the disk you want to test with (it must a valid root
filesystem!)

	disklabel -B rzX

where X is the SCSI id of the disk, and copy the /boot file to the root
partition on that disk.  You DO NOT need to use an installboot-style
program with those bootblocks - indeed, there isn't one.  Then boot of
the test disk.  You should see something like:

	>>boot                        
	>> NetBSD/pmax Secondary Boot, Revision 1.0
	>> (simonb@mona, Fri Mar 26 12:14:28 EST 1999)
	Boot: 3/rz0/netbsd
	1317176+57264+225092 [89+63536+51822]=0x1a3d6c
	Starting at 0x80030000

	[ preserving 116024 bytes of netbsd ELF symbol table ]
	mcclock: iters 24627 computed MHz 60, instrs per usec=27
	Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
	    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
	Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
	    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
	...

Older kernels will have different "preserving ... table" lines.


Any questions, please send mail to my simonb@netbsd.org address - my
normal email address seems _very_ slow at the moment...

Simon.