[Simh] Standalone boot on vax8600?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2014-07-08 01:50, Henry Bent wrote:
> How are standalone programs loaded and run on the 8600?  On the 7x0 I
> can do "load -o boot 0" and "run 2" and that will run a standalone
> boot.  When I do that in the 8600 sim I get a newline and then the
> program just loops forever.
>
> Alternately, does anyone know the right way to load bootblocks on an ra
> disk in Ultrix 1 or 2 so that I can boot off of the disk directly?
> Everything I've tried just ends up giving a "%BOOT-F-Unable to locate
> BOOT fil" message from vmb.exe.

VMB needs to have R5 set to specific values to boot Ultrix.
If I remember right, bit 3 (0x8) needs to be set in R5 in order for VMB 
to just load the boot block from the device and start executing that 
instead of trying to look for specific files inside a Files-11 filesystem.

But on a rel 86x0, you can also load other binaries from the console 
device, and just start them. For old versions of Ultrix, I seem to 
remember that this is what they did, before VMB gained the capability to 
boot from a boot block.

	Johnny