21 May
2011
21 May
'11
10:45 a.m.
On Saturday (05/21/2011 at 09:31AM +0100), Pete Turnbull wrote:
On 21/05/2011 01:12, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
Not kermit, no, but the whole point of VTSERVER is to get an OS onto
bare metal -- no OS required. It runs on a PC or Unix workstation and
squirts a bootstrap to a PDP-11 console, and then can copy the rest of
an OS.
That's right...
The first step vtserver performs is to chat with ODT and "toggle in" a
trivial serial port bootstap. It uses "L" and "D" to deposit that
bootstrap at origin 1000 I believe and then executes it.
Then it sends a "copy" program which understands how to talk to various
RL, RX, etc devices and the VT device which is the virtual tape interface
across the serial port to the list of files you have configured into
vtserver.
Chris
Elmquist wrote:
As was mentioned, vtserver really does work
pretty well... although it
is slow at 9600 baud.
If you read the previous posts to this thread,
it does not seem as if RT-11 (or any other OS)
is available, as yet, to run VTSERVER, let
alone any other program such as Kermit. From there, you can copy an image from VT to RL, which
puts that image
down to the RL sector by sector.
You do have to be a little careful if the destination RL has bad blocks
because this scheme does not account for those. It puts the image file
to the destination media at exactly the same blocks as they are in the
image file.
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist