[Simh] Netbooting the SIMH VAX emulator

[David Brownlee]

On 7 July 2013 12:20, David Brownlee <abs at absd.org> wrote:
> On 6 July 2013 00:46, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm <Mark at infocomm.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I wonder if the *BSD/vax code assumes the ethernet interface is in a
> certain state which is always true on real hardware and
> simh-from-disk, but not on simh-netboot? Its quite likely VMS is more
> diligent about initialising the hardware...

Actually - if its the bootloader that failing then its quite possible
the *BSD standalone ethernet code is driving the hardware slightly
differently which works on real hardware but not simh...