[Simh] Netbooting the SIMH VAX emulator

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

The VAX 3900, MicroVAX2, and MicroVAX1 simulators all can boot VMS over the network (and join a VMScluster).  I think that the MicroVAX 1 has some VMS version constraints, but the boot activity works.  The boot host in these cases have been real hardware or smh VAX systems.

From: simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Joel Heikkila
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2013 12:47 PM
To: simh at trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] Netbooting the SIMH VAX emulator

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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