On Sun, 17 Dec 2000, Matt London wrote:

>   I've just aquired a microvax 3100 M10e, complete with a 100M drive
> with VAX/VMS 5.4 (woo!). I've dumped a 1G segage drive in there, which
> the box can see (it shows up in show dev), but VMS won't initialize,
> so I thought "Hey, why not put NetBSD on there".
>
> My problem is thus:
> The machine has 4M physical RAM. I've got the NetBSD-1.5 install
> netbooting as far as loading the kernel, but it get's to running
> sysinst, then drops out having run out of swap. I'm passing a
> swap=fourway:/path/to/swap argument with bootparam, but it doesn't
> seem to be picking it up (swap is a 32M file). I'm sure there's a way
> round this.

Yeah, that's probably a worthwhile bug to report.  I'm not sure I've ever
been able to get the "swap=" option in bootparam to be picked up properly.

What I've done in the past with tight installs like this is to exit out of
sysinst.  Next you manually mount up the swap space.  I've only done this
with local swap partitions, but it should work fine with NFS mounted
files.

Use NFS to mount up the filesystem on which the remote swap file lives.
And the use swapctl to add the file as swap space.

  # mkdir /some_local_mntpoint
  # mount fourway:/path/to /some_local_mntpoint
  # swapctl -a /some_local_mntpoint/swap

The re-run sysinst (I think it's in the path by default?)

  # sysinst

I'm saying this off the top of my head, and I've not played with the new
1.5 stuff yet, so no guarantees.  But this should hopefully point you in
the right direction.

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes
and weigh only 1.5 tons. -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949