On Wed, 29 May 2002, Jochen Kunz wrote:

> > I got it stable, but i never did fix some problems with probing the 
> > q-bus. The result is that booting is not very smooth. I never got the
> > time to fix it properly, and i decided that when i do , i'll be
> > concentrating on fixing it in reno 
> Hmmm. Reno. I tried to get it on a MV3800 with KFQSA and RF72 once. I
> had to label the disk with NetBSD to get Reno to recognize it and I
> never got the bootblocks to boot from it. So I used a RD53 for booting
> and /. 

I started out similarly, using a netbsd boot tape to label the disks, and
writing the label to mirror ultrix's default partitions for the disk,
and then populating the filesystems from ultrix and booting with ultrix's 
boot blocks and boot loader (which had no problem loading ultrix kernels) 
til i had a working system. I actually started with reno and then with that
got a tahoe setup properly. With the 4000, i of course hacked the 
bootblocks first in order to load the kernel properly. The qbus probes are
really flaky, ive had some helpful hints about it, but i havent had the 
time to go in and really wrap my head around why it is still breaking. As 
it is, a kludge is to insert a halt or two at various stages, and this seems
to clear the problems enough to get the system going. Once it's booted, 
it is solid. One bummer is that it only sees 64 megs of memory. There are 
comments in cmap.h about increasing it, but my attemmpts so far have caused
instant crashes in locore while it is counting up memory. 
I do recommend trying it out on your 4400, though, it is _really_ fast.. 

> Argl. I really need the doc for that 5.25" 1GB SMD Seagate disk.
> Together with my QD33 it will be a really nice storage system for the
> MV3800 and Reno... 

smd? cool! i dont think ive heard of SMD disks on a vax before, i'd only 
ever heard of them in the sun world generally (though my lisp machine has 
one :-)
> 
> Hmmm. Hmm. Hmmmm??? I think I will leave Tahoe on the MV III and use the
> 4k400 for NetBSD.

happy hacking,
isildur