[Simh] Netbooting the SIMH VAX emulator

[Joel Heikkila]

Hi all,

Just on a whim, I decided to try to netboot NetBSD on the VAX emulator. The
mopd/dhcpd/NFS server is FreeBSD amd64 and the machine SIMH was running on
is FreeBSD sparc64, they were both on the same hub.  I'm using the latest
SIMH code from Github.  I tried it with both the "vax" µVAX 3900 emulator
and the "microvax2" emulator.

First, the MOP bootloader from every NetBSD since I think 1.5.3 is broken
such as
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.0.2/vax/installation/netboot/boot(unless
I'm misconfiguring it or downloading the wrong file), so you have
to dig into the archives to find a working bootloader such as from 1.5.3
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-1.5.2/vax/installation/netboot/boot.mop


I got mopd to serve up the bootloader, the bootloader to boot and to get
bootp configuration info from the dhcpd server.  Checking with Wireshark,
the emulated VAX then makes a NFS mount request and then goes silent on
Ethernet, printing endlessly on the console "stray interrupt: vector 0x18,
ipl 31".  Googling this wasn't much help and I don't have a real VAX to
test with.  I got the same error trying with OpenBSD's loader under the
same setup too.

Has anyone successfully netbooted any VAX OS under the SIMH emulators?
 It's not much of pressing issue since I'm just having some fun, but it has
made me curious.  Maybe this counts as a bug report of sorts.

Thanks,

Joel
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