Re: Can you MOP boot an install kernel directly?

On 8/4/25 06:57, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> Den 2025-08-03 kl. 23:45, skrev Perry Metzger:
>> So there seems to be an INSTALL kernel with the usual root-on-ramdisk 
>> available for the Vax. Is there a good reason that one can't directly 
>> MOP boot this?
> IIRC MOP on some machines could only load a small amount of data (like 
> 256k or so).  Some MOP guru may fillin here?
>
> Also, if the kernel is loaded my MOP then there are some trickery that 
> needs to be done since it is not located on the expected position in 
> memory.  I wrote code to do that long time ago, it needs 
> KERNEL_LOADABLE_BY_MOP defined when generating a kernel. Maybe it can 
> be made to detect whether it is loaded by the boot program or not.

Okay, so, I have a VAXstation 4000 VLC I'm setting up and I'd like to 
try to avoid needing a full NFS server, rarpd, and all the rest of that 
to boot it for installation (and as I am thinking of cleaning up some of 
the install tools I might be installing it repeatedly). One thing that 
struck me as a possibility was booting an INSTALL  kernel with an 
embedded ramdisk directly from MOP, another option struck me as fixing 
the network boot blocks so that they can use dhcp and tftp to download 
the kernel instead of requiring a full NFS setup. (Many ports allow this 
one way or another, either from the blocks themselves or from mechanisms 
like PXE.)

Perry