On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Henry R. Bent wrote:

> I have a VAX 4000/2000 that I just started up for the first time since August.
> I used to boot it from a 4000/90 running 1.5.2, and that set-up had no
> problems.  In the meantime, though, I wiped the 4000/90 and put a clean install
> of 1.6 on it.  It is currently correctly configured as the boot server for the
> 4k/200.   However, mopd's ELF support seems to be broken somehow on this
> platform.  When loading the 1.6 bootloader, I get:
>
> ?50 SCB2NDINT, EZA0
> ?06 HLT INST
>         PC = 00000D42
>
>
> The system will correctly load a 1.5 1st stage bootloader over MOP, and will
> even boot a 1.5.3 kernel, but obviously none of this is of any use to those of
> us who would like to run 1.6.  Does something need to be patched in the mopd
> source code for ELF support, perhaps?

You're certainly on the right track.  What I found is that the second
stage boot loader for the 1.6 release:

  ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.6/vax/installation/netboot/boot

isn't a MOP image.  There's a new tool `mopcopy' which is supposed to
translate a.out or ELF images into moppable ones.  At first I thought it
was just a release engineering oversight of failing to convert the boot
file, but then when I tried to use mopcopy, I found that mopcopy was
broken.  It ended up creating some useless 50MB file from the the 64KB
boot loader--quite a feat. :-)

It would probably be worthwhile to look at creating an a.out version of
the bootloader to see if mopcopy can cope with that.  If not, the older
mopa.out should convert it.  It's a bit of project however you look at
it.  I still haven't gotten around send-pr'ing a description of the
problem.  I'm too busy reading and writing e-mail.

-brian.