On 2016-07-30 12:09 PM, Greg Stark wrote:
On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 2:38 AM, Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD?
Yes. Recent (and some not-so-recent) versions are broken, in that they
can't self-host; as far as I know nobody knows exactly what's wrong.
My impression (as someone who hasn't tried it, but who has seen it
discussed on port-vax) is that something breaks somewhere in the
compiler when running native.
You may also find recent(ish) versions are too resource-hungry; the
MicroVAX-II can't have more than 16M RAM, which is pretty tiny by
modern NetBSD's standards (pretty much ever since they relegated most
ports to second-class, er, sorry, "organic" status).
The Micro VAX II supports mop booting so you can boot NetBSD entirely
diskless with an NFS from a BSD or Linux NFS server just fine. This is
supported right up to current versions of NetBSD though I recommend
NetBSD 6.1.5. Later versions have bugs GCC which cause massive
headaches. Even the GCC in 6.1.5 is a bit buggy. I had to recompile
awk with -O0 or else various
I followed:
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/netboot/
I forget where I diverged from it so if you run into any issues just
ask and I'll check what I did.
FWIW I also put this HOWTO together for NetBSD 1.4.1.
https://github.com/qu1j0t3/mopd/blob/master/HOWTO-MicroVAX-II.md
--Toby
The hardest part was getting mopd on Linux to serve up the NetBSD boot
loader properly. The mopd for Linux didn't support ELF images and the
NetBSD boot loader isn't in mopd format in more recent versions of
NetBSD like it was in older versions. Now it's just ELF. But it's
finally working. If you use NetBSD to serve mopd this isn't an issue.
If you want to use Linux I can send you an mopd format copy of the
boot loader.
...
