Brad Parker wrote:
Johnny Billquist wrote:Brad Parker wrote:"David Brownlee" wrote:Whats next on the list, bootblocks? :)sort of :-) full install from tape. seems very broken right now for 11/7xx.Considering the fact that the 11/7xx machines never supported booting from tape in the first place, that's no surprise. :-)well ok, I didn't mean booting per se. I ment installing from tape. sorry for the confusion.
Installing from tape means you somehow have to extract the data from the tape, so in one way or another, you need to boot something. But as others have mentioned, the 11/750 appearantly can. The 11/78x and 86x0 machine cannot for sure.
That is, VMB can't even boot from tape. There is no way to get the machine to even try booting from a tape.Yes, I understand. I think I've previously talked about "boot.bin" being on the 730 boot tape (tu58) or on the 780 boot floppy. Or, I assume the 750 console tape (also tu58). I'm assuming you have console media with 'boot' and 'copy' on it. and I'm just focusing on 11/7xx's right now.
Yes. That's probably the easiest way of solving the problem. I know I did that on the 8650 here. Not sure if that might be a bit tricker on an 11/750. The one we had around here usually didn't have anything in the TU58 drive. Not sure how thing hung together on that machine. It's been too long since I played with one.
But I didn't know we had problems with the bootblocks. What kind of problems are we talking about here?Not a problem with boot blocks. A coordination problem getting the miniroot in place. I can't find a recipe for installing netbsd on an 11/7xx from a tape. Nor can I find a way to make a suitable tape image. I don't think you can do it anymore. I'll describe one solution before I describe the problem. My current thinking is that I will do the following to rectify: - write a simple program which can be loaded from a tape by 'boot' which will create a reasonable disk label. - create a tape image which has the following (separated by tape marks) simple-partition-program (elf) ffs-miniroot-filesystem tar of component to install tar of component to install ... Why? Everything in the old days assumed you could copy the miniroot to the swap partition. And to make that true the "copy" program had a predefined "default" paritition map. By agreement, all of the "disktab" partitions and the default partition map in "copy" have the swap partition (partition B) starting at the same place. That way running the miniroot won't get trashed when you repartition. In the old days, no matter what disk you had, you could use "copy" to copy the miniroot to swap and then repartition the disk and copy to it safely. But the old partition maps and the default map on in "copy" are now much too small. So I think we need some way to make a default partition map which has an "a" partition big enough for an install. Since I'm only worried about mscp disks, it's a simple job. I'll just creating a map with a small swap at the end of the disk and big "a" partition. You could argue about that, but at least it will work. I'll include a way to override that. With that, I can first create the map, then copy the miniroot, then run the normal install program. As an aside, I originally found the generic kernel would not run on a 780. Right now, after fixes, I'm seeing the kernel will run from the miniroot but it does not see the 'ra' disk during the unibus probe (I'm debugging that - it may be that 'boot' leaves ra in a some odd state or who knows, something else). I'm currently debugging on netbsd-3. I've also had problems getting some of the sa utilties to run on a 780. bitrot I think. no doubt they work fine on a 4000.
To make a few comments. I think that a tape today should have the diskless install system as the first (or second) file on the tape, and then just the tar files. No need to for anything more complicated. The install system is self-contained and can do everything you need. So no need to mess with specific programs on the tape, with all the extra complexity of getting them to run standalone.
You might be interested in placing the actual boot program before the install system, since for machines where you can boot from tape (uVVAX II for instance) that will make it all play.
Second, I don't get the 8650 here do detect the MSCP controller which the system boots from either, so I think it's a problem that isn't 11/780-specific. And it's something that was introduced fairly recently. Like in the last year or so. There was a big change around of things last year, if I remember right. Stuff that I had written for the 86x0 machines were removed at that time (to my big annoyance).
Johnny
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