Re: NetBSD/vax vm for github testing

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 at 21:37, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw%lug-owl.de@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2025-01-03 21:02:50 +0100, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw%lug-owl.de@localhost> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2025-01-03 18:32:00 +0000, David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:
> > > Much kudos and a starting contribution towards a suitable amount of caffeine
> > > ($100) for anyone up for the challenge :)
> >
> >   Installing the resulting ISO in a microvax3900 SIMH VM is easy as
> > well (doing that all the time with a simple expect script.) Running
> > something in there might be a bit fiddly (some masquerading /
> > forwarding needed), and we need to keep in mind that the newest
> > (pkgsrc) version of Python isn't yet/any longer supporting VAX.
> >
> >   So if there are some docs about what _is_ there to use and what kind
> > of interface for the CI "driver" is needed, it's probably not hard to
> > do, though will require a few cycles to properly cook...
>
> Well, it would be helpful if a Github CI VM could attach an additional
> disk (containing a NetBSD VAX disk image.)  Open-SIMH microvax3900
> could be built on the fly, some iptables (or whatever) rules to
> forward traffic could easily be setup, but the VAX NetBSD disk image
> would take quite some time to prepare. That's probably not feasible
> for within a Perl test run...

Looking at https://github.com/vmactions/netbsd-vm?tab=readme-ov-file#2-share-code
it syncs code to run to the VM via rsync (also supports sshfs or nfs),
and uses pre-build ova disk images.

I image the same could be done for NetBSD/VAX simh images - there
should probably be a script for taking a NetBSD release .img and
generating the simh image, but that would be an occasional task,
rather than once per CI VM startup

David