HPs And NetBSD...

Those on the far side of the Atlantic might find the mirror of these pages at http://prozac.cwru.edu/wes/hp/ faster...

Booting information is on this page. I've also written some notes on crosscompiling the NetBSD kernel under Linux. I've also put up information gleaned from the net on DIP switch settings and monitor specs.

I recently obtained an HP9000/340 processor (no disks or monitor!) which I have persuaded into running NetBSD. In theory this is trivial. In practice, it seems to be fraught with problems...

The idea is to boot the HP using my Linux box. The HP requires its server to be running the rbootd daemon, which (since it's an HP-specific protocol) isn't widely available. NetBSD for the HP provides sources, but these are NetBSD-only. Moreover, NetBSD provides the Berkeley Packet Filter, which Linux doesn't...

Fortunately, the libpcap library can be used as a BPF replacement, although it will only read packets; we need to do something else to write them.

Get Your Source Here!

This is about the third version of the sources to be distributed here. This source is properly #ifdeffed so it works on both Linux and NetBSD, hopefully. It should also compile properly on glibc2, and hopefully I haven't broken libc5 compatibility in the process [please let me know if it works on libc5 so I can say so!]

You should:

See also this very sketchy howto guide

Most stuff hasn't changed from the NetBSD version; there are a few extra #include statements for headers that Linux puts in different places. I've used the BSD compatibility libraries and headers to minimise work required. The real changes are in pcap.c, which totally replaces bpf.c, and in rbootd.c, since libpcap requires a different access method for the packet filter.
Oh, and there's a nasty kludge relating to MCLBYTES in rmp.h :-)

I've provided a Makefile for Linux, since the BSD system is different.

If you're having difficulty tracking down bootparamd, try this version (7K). Unfortunately it doesn't seem to compile as-is under Linux. Try doing the rpcgen steps on a Sun; alternatively, use these pregenerated versions (3K). You should also seek out an alleged Red Hat Linux package of this. It's also in recent versions of the Debian netstd package. See the notes in the HOWTO as well.


This page written by Peter Maydell (pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk).