On Sat, 31 May 1997, Curt Sampson wrote:

> What's wrong with the ROM routines that do this on the VAXen? Or
> is the VS2000 the only one that has test commands built in to the
> monitor?
 
> Anyway, I don't see any reason to clutter up the boot loader with
> test code; build a standalone program that gets loaded like the
> kernel does, boot that instead of your regular kernel, and you've
> got as much room as you want for hardware diagnostics.

I think most all of the newer VAXen do have fairly decent built in
diagnostic support.  "Decent" meaning that it's relatively user friendly.
However, the MicroVAX II I've got doesn't have anything quite like
the built-in diagnostics for the VS2000 and VS3100.  I do really think it
would be nice to have some bootable diagnostic/test software in a bootable
image for older VAX machines which don't have them in ROM.

--

As for other bootloader stuff.  I'll be sure to never mention LILO again
on this mailing list. :-) The one thing I would like to see added to the
present boot loader would be additional stand-alone ethernet driver
support. In particular support for the Q-bus DEQNA ethernet board would
be nice, but I guess that's already in the works.

-brian.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian D. Chase         Systems Coordinator        brian.chase@carpediem.com
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