jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao) (03/22/85)
My UDA-50 driver for System V turns out to be almost ready for release.
The last few weeks of debugging my UDA-50 driver on hardware sworn
to be good turned out to be good exercise in finding hardware flaws.
The problems all turned out to be hardware, but the driver is some-
what more robust for it.
Now I am doing the boot sector (512 bytes!), and am finding it hard
to fit all the UDA-50 initialisation in. But, somewhere, the 11/780
and 11/750 ROMs have routines that already did all the handshaking
and set up a communications area. One is even supposed to have
access to the mini-drivers in ROM via addresses passed up through
registers (11/750) or a "Restart Parameter Block" (11/780). "The
RPB holds the bootstrap input registers, the boot device's CSR and
bus configuration register (CR), the address of the RPB [??? do they
mean SCB ???], and pointers to a primitive device driver."
I have doped out all but the last two. If someone has the layout of
the RPB, or a listing of the code in the ROM and VMB.EXE programs that
create it, as well as the calling sequences for the "primitive driver
routines," I would be very greatful to receive them by netmail. I
would be even happier to get a breakdown for all VAXen of boot
procedures -- much I have guessed, but is there anything from the --
ah -- horse's mouth?
As usual, if I also get netmail asking for re-posting, I'll be glad
to do so.
Joe Yao hadron!jsdy@seismo.{ARPA,UUCP}