Hi,

I'm planning for having a VAX 6660 (NVAX?) sometime next year,
and my choices are VMS or ... nothing yet. Neither ULTRIX not
NetBSD will run those. What I wonder, what is the big deal with
porting from one VAX CPU to another? They should all be basically
comapatible, right?

Of course there is the bus, device, and driver issue, but that
is true even for my 6000-400 machines XMI, VAXBI, etc. I'm
still planning to take care of that as soon as I have a foot
in with Ultrix and the second machine, SA, SC, and HSC down in
the basement and working.

There is also the different way that consoles work and
bootstrapping needs to be done for the different classes of
machines, I understand. However, I assume that the 6000 class
is basically the same in that regard.

So I really only wonder about the CPU itself at this point.
Anything more than

- make the CPU symbol known to the kernel code, config(8) etc.
- extend the auto-detection code
- make define the private CPU registers
- a bit here a bit there :-)

Not having done this yet, is there a big hurdle that I am
not anticipating?

regards
-Gunther


-- 
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow@regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org