Re: PMAX serial console

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Boris Maryshev wrote:

> Guys, thanks a lot! I've got it working!!! Thank you Benson, Skylar and 
> Kirk! Now I think I need to set-up tftp server and try to install NetBSD 
> on this machine... Also I might give Linux MIPS a try, although 
> NetBSD/PMAX documentation seems much more consistent and up-to-date than 
> docs for Linux/MIPS... Another challenge for me and my PMAX would be 
> setting up Plan 9 on it, I'll be posting more on that soon.

 Please note that, regrettably, Linux support for the PMAX is severely
inadequate, unlike with the TURBOchannel members of the DECstation family.  
There is no SII SCSI nor framebuffer driver and the serial driver does not
support attaching a keyboard (the latter should be resolved soon, but
tested with a 3MAX only).  What should work is the system core (the R2k
CPU is fully supported as well as the PMAX-specific handling of the
writeback buffer), the serial console and the LANCE network driver, so you
should be able to run Linux in an NFS-root setup.  Unfortunately, due to
the lask of hardware for testing the support wasn't checked for quite some
time and is recently based on specs only.  Thus there may be stupid bugs
that actually prevent the setup from working.  I had an opportunity to get
a free PMAX last year, but I missed it.  I hope I'll be able to get one
eventually, but meanwhile if you are really interested in Linux, I'd be
happy to provide help and appreciate any feedback from you.

 I can build a reasonably recent kernel (that is known to work at least
for the 3MAX+, the 4MIN and the 4MAX+) and make it available for you if
you'd like to give it a shot.  You can take a suitably recent userland
from elsewhere (mine is a development environment only and hardly useful
for anything else, e.g. no startup scripts, only inittab), e.g. Debian
provides support for the little-endian MIPS.  You can also try the Debian 
installation kernel, initially -- perhaps it'll work out of the box.

  Maciej