On Sat, 31 Jan 1998, Michael Sokolov wrote:

> All people who work on NetBSD/vax consider VAXen a retrocomputing
> diversion.

Yeah, and all russians speak bad english, all americans are fat, and all
swedes want to kill themselves. This is called prejudice and is
generally considered a bad thing. In schools in diabolic countries like
the U.S. they teach you why. Maybe you should attend one.

> How many people here professionally manage
> clusters of brand new VAXen operating in full production and competing with
> Pentiums and SPARCs while giving shell access to thousands of users?
[snip]
>    But for me at least, the alternative is not Ultrix or VMS. These systems
> are crippled in their own ways. First and foremost, they are commercial.
[snip]
> The second problem is the way these systems treat KA410 BabyVAXen (see
> below).

You're gonna give shell access to thousands of users on KA410's?? I see 3
possible reasons for this:

1) You've never used a one
2) You've got alot of space to fill
3) You're drunk (or worse)

(in no particular order of likeliness)

> architectures. On the other hand, BabyVAXen and PMAXen have nearly the same
> architecture (the same approach to handling serial lines, the same SCSI
> subsystem, the same Ethernet subsystem, etc.), and if the design of UNIX
> allowed it (unfortunately it doesn't, see later) they could have been
> treated as the same architecture. There are countless other examples.
[snip]
> this is still a dream. Even NetBSD with its very multiplatformist ideology
> is still far from this. (IIRC, VME has been generalized but all other buses
> are still tied to CPU architectures.)

How about the SCSI bus?

> > controller scsi0 at uba0 csr 0x200c0080 vector szintr
>    
>    This line supports the first NCR 5380 SCSI controller on KA42/41. Now,
> this controller is exactly the same hardware-wise as the one on KA410. This
> means that if DEC enabled this line on KA410 your VS2000 would immediately
> start supporting generic SCSI disks and tapes just like VS3100! Somehow DEC
> blocks this line on KA410, since it's certainly present in the GENERIC
> kernel (how would it support KA42/41s otherwise?)

Wasn't the last word from Bertram that they do DMA transfers differently?
You might've been too high to notice.

>    But here we see an example to the contrary. Making Ultrix support SCSI
> disks on KA410 would be a matter of 5 minutes: simply remove the artificial
> blocking! The same is probably true for VMS and VMB. But DEC didn't do it,
> instead engaging in _ARTIFICIAL FEATURE BLOCKING_, a kind of high treason
> and a crime against humanity for which one must be immediately executed.

By the opressive government or your un-opressive revolutionaries?

> annoyance. That's why it's so important to create an alternative system ROM
> for KA410 if it turns out that the TMSCP over SCSI approach is indeed used.

Or you could boot from diskdrive, MFM disk, or network, which would be
much simpler.

Oscar

PS. You make me nauseous