From a hardware perspective, porting a Tru64 UNIX system to Avanti is equivalent to moving it to an AlphaServer 400.  If you are comfortable in the Tru64 UNIX environment, this is a straightforward process.  If you are not comfortable with Tru64 UNIX, Migration Specialties offers turnkey porting services.  Contact us for more information at [email protected].

There are two choices when moving from one Alpha type to another:

1)Boot from the O/S CD, build a new system disk, and restore/merge the files from your original system or disks.

2)Boot from the old system disk using the Generic kernel, genvmunix, and build a new kernel that supports the new Alpha's architecture (i.e. the platform type).

To boot the generic kernel, use something like:

>>> boot dkaXXX -flags 1 -file /genvmunix

This should boot single user with the hardware recognized and root mounted read-only.  If it works, then you have the option of running from genvmunix going forward or rebuilding a new kernel.

Section 5 of the Tru64 System Admininstrator's Guide has good discussion of how to do this. The V4 documentation set is available online at HP.  The following link is a good starting point:

http://www.frascati.enea.it/documentation/tru6450/ARH8RATE/FLLDCSTC.HTM

You will need to run bcheckrc, sizer -n, do some editing of the new config file, and use doconfig to build a new 'vmunix', as per section 5.4.1 of the V4 manual above. Do not delete or overwrite genvmunix.