mts (11/23/82)
We (UofMichigan) have had a 750 for some time, with only ra80,rl02. We had to get an interim version of the kernel from berkeley, with their uda50 driver. To bring the system up we first put the ra80 online on one of the 780's unibusses, then copied the system into the ra80. We had to develop a boot procedure for it using the digital roms. Currently this works by using the first track on the first cyl of the disk; the boot block is sector 0, then we have the standalone boot right after that. The boot block reads in the standalone, then the system comes up with the boot prompt. We then need some changes in the uda50 driver (easy ones, though, since the uda50 driver for the ra doesn't talk cyl/track/sector, but only block number) to displace beyond the first track. There was no strong reason to pick one track as the length of the area to boot. The constraint fron the digital boot procedure on the 750 is ~64k (128 blocks). The standalone boot procedure only needs some 20 blocks. We intend to find (or write) a tu58 console interface, then place the boot procedure on the tu58. We don't like the idea of having a displacement on the ra80's, it will cause trouble somewhere in the future when someone plays with the raw device. We don't have any future (yet) for the rl02. Maybe it will never have one. Michael Stolarchuk uofm-cv (UofMichigan,Ciprnet)