> I haven't fiddled with my VAX lately.  We had a power outage and my
> suitable serial console was on the other side of the building and the
> booter won't finish its countdown when the machine is coldstarted.
> 
> But I have been reading the list and now that I've hauled the VAX over to
> Mouhamed, I'm back in business.  So, a couple of questions:
> 
> 1)  Is 1.5 worth trying on a low-memory VAX?  My system:
> 
> 	MicroVAX II
> 	realmem = 11526144
> 	avail mem = 8810496
> 	Using 140 buffers containing 573440 bytes of memory.

I hate to say it, since I don't want to be called a heretic, but, 
IMHO 1.5 and up will not be much fun on an MVII.  It is just too slow.
The 1.5 suite runs just fine on my 3100 and up lines of machines.
That said, it won't boot from tape, but it might netboot.  I built mine
from a snapshot of 1.4ZB or something like that, by unrolling it manually.
It came up fine, and runs fine.  But, it takes about 5 times as long to
boot, and seems to run about 1/3 slower on my box with scsi disks and
same ram as yours.  I loaded up everything from 1.0A through 1.5 over
the past week, and my gut impressions are that the best are 1.4.3, 1.3.2,
and 1.2, in that order.  1.5 is too slow, and the rest have minor gotchas
that make them problematic.  The only boot system that worked flawlessly
was 1.4.1.  I used that to install 1.4.3.  The 1.4.3 install ran out of temp
space and died, requiring a manual roll things in from tape and manually set
it up.  Have others had trouble with the 1.4.3 boot/install system?
 
> 2)  I'm currently running a kernel named _SMIDGEN_ that some kind soul
> built to remove all the stuff the uVAX II didn't need in order to save as
> much memory as possible.  Might somebody build such a kernel for 1.5?

I built 1.5 and 1.4.3 kernels stripped.  Just take a long vacation.
It takes over 24 hours to build a stripped 1.5 kernel (compared to under
5 hours in 1.2... is that not telling us something?).  Food for thought.
The stripped 1.2 kernel is around 380K, compared to the stripped 1.5
kernel, pushing upwards of a meg.  No wonder things are slow.

> 3)  Has the little problem with the booter not booting after a cold start
> been found/fixed?

I had 1.5 booting fine once installed.  There is no bootfs for it, and
one that was put together by another did not work on MVII by tape, but
worked fine on my 3100 line boxes from a spare HD.  The bootcd works
fine, but I have not tried running that up from my scsi board on an MVII.

I have had some hangs in 1.4.3, that an init and unjam would not fix,
and those required a button reset.  1.4.3 dumps core on shutdown, but
manually halted works fine.  The 1.5 ran fine all the way around but
was just slow.

My sense is still that 1.4.x is the end of the line on the oldenVAXencrates
pushing 1.0 and under speeds (MVII, 780, 750, 730, etc.).  I would like to
hear what other folks running these above boxes have been able to do on
1.5.  I know, they are dinosuars.  But they are fun dinosaurs, and are
our heritage.  They just need a little code geritol....(:+}}...

Thanks, and good luck.....

Bob