Re: Can you MOP boot an install kernel directly?

[Perry Metzger <perry%piermont.com@localhost>]

On 8/4/25 09:59, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> > Okay, so, I have a VAXstation 4000 VLC I'm setting up and I'd like to 
> > try to avoid needing a full NFS server, rarpd, and all the rest of 
> > that to boot it for installation (and as I am thinking of cleaning up 
> > some of the install tools I might be installing it repeatedly). One 
> > thing that struck me as a possibility was booting an INSTALL  kernel 
> > with an embedded ramdisk directly from MOP, another option struck me 
> > as fixing the network boot blocks so that they can use dhcp and tftp 
> > to download the kernel instead of requiring a full NFS setup. (Many 
> > ports allow this one way or another, either from the blocks 
> > themselves or from mechanisms like PXE.)
> Yes, sounds like something that would be smooth to have.
> - Adding support for tftp to boot is mostly trivial.

Also dhcp. Which is also easy enough since libsa handles both. Then one 
can load an INSTALL kernel very easily over the network and install that 
way.

> - Making the install kernel detect whether loaded via mop or is 
> probably not especially difficult either.
>
> Note that netbooting is something quite new in the vax world :-) It 
> was not until moj@stacken wrote mopd that it could be done at all, 
> before that I used boot on a local media (floppy) that loaded the 
> kernel from a SunOS4 machine.  Hence bootparams is also included in 
> the boot program :-)

Yah, it's certainly not something people would have wanted to do 45 
years ago but now it's pretty useful.

Does SIMH support MOP btw?

Perry