"michael@camaronet.de" "Michael Kukat" wrote:

> Maybe i can get a VAX 6310 next days/weeks. Does anybody know something
> about this machine ? Which enclosure (the friend who told me about it
> showed something very big...) ? does it run NetBSD ?
> Only thing i know so far is: 35 Tps, could be about 4-6 VUPs, don't know
> exactly. Does anybody have experience with this machine and can tell me
> something about it ?

All the VAX 6000 series live in the same enclosure about 1.5m tall, 780mm wide
and 760mm deep, about 320kg in weight. Three phase supply chewing up about
1.6kW (although you may be able to adapt it for single phase use).

Each KA62B processor (1989 vintage) produces about 3.8VUPs and Digital
officially supported up to six, by which time you are getting about 22VUPs. You
can apparently have up to eight processors in there but I expect that the extra
return on the 7th and 8th processors is somewhat diminished.
You can get an OpenVMS Hobbyist licence from www.montagar.com which will
support this machine.I haven't seen anything about NetBSD support for the 6000
series. But the processor is the same CVAX that is supported by NetBSD in the
KA650-based MicroVAX 3500/3600 series so at least some of the CPU code exists
already. There are technical manuals for most of the 6000 series - I know I
have the ones for the 6000-500 and 6000-600 and maybe the 6000-400. I have a
6000-200/300 manual but I think that is the service manual and may not cover
the CPU details needed to add support for this machine to NetBSD.

There is a manual which covers the XMI details in quite some depth, although
that is not obvious from its title. If you are interested in cooking up some
support for the VAX 6000 platform let me know and I'll dig up all the
references I have.

I believe that the VAX 8200 is supported so I presume that there must be some
code kicking around for the VAXBI and KDB50 so you have at least one viable
boot path. I expect that the hardware supports MOP booting over the XMI
ethernet adapter (DEMNA) and there was definitely a technical manual for that
so that may be another path to follow up.

Congratulations on finding such a useful box - you can produce anything from a
VAX 6000-210 to a VAX 6000-460 in that box. If by some stroke of luck you have
the later backplane (XMI2) or the adapter that turns the older backplane into
the newer one then you can go all the way up to a VAX 6000-660 in the same cab!


Antonio