Mirian Crzig Lennox writes:
> Here's a subject that's very near and dear to my heart.  I would love to
> be able to run vanilla 4.3BSD on my VaxStation 3100, even if for nothing
> more than pure nostalgia and hack value.  I have my Ancient Unix Source
> License and Kirk McKusick's CD archive to start with.  But 4.3BSD only
> supports booting from UNIBUS and MASSBUS devices, which of course the
> VS3100 doesn't have.  So, I'm somewhat stuck.

VAXstations (other than VAXstation-II) are that different from older
VAXen that IMHO there's almost no chance.

> For a while, I was hoping that the NetBSD/vax bootblock and bootloader
> were similar enough that I could at least get 4.3 to boot /vmunix to
> the point where it went looking for a root device.  But apparently,
> they aren't... I can get the NetBSD bootloader to load /vmunix, but it
> hangs hard immediately.  This was about a year ago that I tried this,
> with some variety of 1.4.

VAXstations don't support MTPR/MFPR for console-I/O, thus I'm rather sure
that you'll never see any output from a 4.3 kernel on a VAXstation. Thus
you don't even see where /vmunix fails. Maybe when trying to access the
console, maybe somewhere else. Away from that, busses, devices, handling
of interrupts, I/O-registers and all that stuff are completely different.
Without heavily modifying the sources you'll stay stuck.

WRT VAXstation go for NetBSD, Ultrix or VMS. (odered alphabetically)

Just my 0.02 EUR.

Ciao,
	bertram