Re: [Q] Booting a jensen system
Jim Paradis (paradis@amt.tay1.dec.com)
Tue, 24 Oct 1995 22:20:58 -0500 (EDT)
> I think the solution for the SRM consoles is to change the secondary
> bootstrap loader to prompt for a command line string. For example,
>
> >>> boot -fl i dka600
>
> could be interpreted by the secondary bootstrap loader to prompt for
> an option line. This is pretty much guaranteed to work on any system
> because OSF/1 uses similar one-character options.
>
> The real question is of course how to avoid having to type these
> options each time you boot. I think it would be reasonable to
> reserve, say, one sector on the disk to hold default options that
> are used if nothing else is specified.
>
> I meant to implement this in aboot for quite some time but as I don't
> have a Jensen, there is little incentive to do so and there always
> have been more pressing things to do. But if somebody wanted to take
> a shot at it, feel free to ask me anything you might want to know
> about aboot/SRM---implementing this should be straight forward.
I'm gonna do something like this for BLADE 0.3 (which should be out in
the next coupla weeks) precisely so we can support Jensen. In fact,
I'm gonna experiment with the ARC-loadable form of MILO and see if I
can get *that* to boot on a Jensen. That way, you'll *finally* be
able to bootstrap a Jensen from floppy...
--
Jim Paradis (paradis@amt.tay1.dec.com) "It's not procrastination,
Digital Equipment Corporation it's my new Just-In-Time
(508)952-4047 Workload Management System!"