[Simh] V3.10 VAX causes blue screen

[Mark Pizzolato]

Hi Anthony,

See Comments in-line.

--- aceyem at cox.net wrote:
> I downloaded the sources back on the 8th of Jan once I saw a
> new set had been released.  Last night I finally got around to
> building the executables with MINGW.
> 
> I included the ethernet support and also used the USE_ADDR64
> compilier option.  The batch file supplied with the
> distribution ran the makefile and built all the simulators
> including the VAX.
> 
> Over time the size of the VAX executable has shrunk from about
> 1400k to about 580k as of V3.02.  Boy was I surprised to find
> that the v3.10 VAX executable with ethernet support was only
> 374K.  Wow a lot of dead code must've been removed since last
> September.

Much of what has been removed is merely zeros in the executable.
 Some data structures which previously were statically declared
are now dynamically allocated.

> I fired it up and proceeded to boot up VMS 7.1 with DECnet and
> Multinet 4.1 for a TCP/IP stack.  All was going well when just
> after starting Multinet my host system blue screened and
> rebooted.
> 
> At first I thought I may have bumped into the reset button and
> rebooted my Dell and windows 2000 but after trying to bring up
> the VAX again the Dell crashed and rebooted at the same point
> in the VAXes boot up sequence.
> 
> I backed out the 3.10 VAX executable and put the older 3.02 in
> it's place and it came up normally and all network stuff
> worked just fine.
> 
> The 150k change in the executable size makes me tend to think
> that a module is missing or seriously mangled in the V3.10
> distribution.  Any other VAX/VMS having similar experiences? 
> Is the 3.10 distribution tied to a newer WINPCAP?

Well, it is NOT tied, however, you should at least be running
WinPcap 3.

The only change I can tie to a Blue Screen relates to pcap
features that we're using in 3.1 now that we previously weren't.
 Specifically, we're now using BPF filtering, which passes stuff
into the kernel driver to filter packets as they arrive instead
of having all of them passed back to user mode for processing.

Are you running WinPcap 3.0 or later?

Have you picked up the latest NIC drivers for your system from
either Dell and/or Windows Update?

- Mark Pizzolato