Unix Articles & FAQ

Sort of. The kernel supports booting with NFS root and swap partitions, found via bootparam requests. Unfortunately, there's no network boot loader. In other words, you have to put a NetBSD kernel on a Digital UNIX disk and boot the kernel from the disk (with a command like <?php
boot -fi "kernelname"
?>).

If you try to set up a Digital UNIX 3.x (formerly DEC OSF/1) system as an NFS server containing NetBSD diskless root partitions, you'll run into a problem: Digital UNIX 3.x does not properly handle NetBSD device nodes. Apparently, to ease the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit device nodes, Digital added run-time conversion code to convert from the old device node format to the new format. Unfortunately, this causes the device nodes as seen by a diskless NetBSD to be garbage. The only solutions to this are binary or source modifications to the Digital UNIX kernel, so, for most users, the easiest solution is to simply not use a Digital UNIX system as the server for NetBSD diskless clients. Rumor has it that Digital Unix 4.x does not suffer from this problem.