Re: port-vax/60478: releng testbed is busted on VAX

The following reply was made to PR port-vax/60478; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Martin Husemann <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: port-vax/60478: releng testbed is busted on VAX
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:34:12 +0200

 On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 01:50:02AM +0000, Robert Elz via gnats wrote:
 >  I'd still appreciate knowing if there is any difference at all between
 >  the way anita is run on amd64 (and vax perhaps) and on i386 ?
 
 I think this is less an anita related question but more about the install
 medium used.
 
 AFAICT there are three ways an install medium gets into sysinst:
 
  - boot from the final medium (maybe after ffs resize) and run sysinst
    from installed userland (I think evbarm USB images are in this
    category)
 
  - boot a ramdisk kernel ( / on memory disk ) and run sysinst from the
    (crunched) binary inside that
 
  - boot a "normal" kernel with / on the ISO filesystem read-only, with
    a few tmpfs overlaying and some bizare scripts faking init and
    sysinst runing as the login shell. VAX and sparc64 CD/DVD images
    are in this category.
 
 There is also a variant (not available as stock install medium) where
 a special file system images is prepared to mount as / and the kernel
 is loaded from the qemu command line with some args pointing it at
 the boot device - but this should not make a difference to the ramdisk
 kernel from a process/shell point of view.
 
 So I guess the interesting part for you is to either look at a VAX install
 CD directly or check what is going on in src/distrib/vax/cdroms/installcd.
 
 Martin