[Simh] ka655/ka655x + copyright/licensing issues

Peter Lund firefly at vax64.dk
Wed Aug 29 10:21:35 EDT 2007


On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 09:00 -0500, Phil Mendelsohn wrote:

> Not unless "we" means HP's legal dept.

I figured it would be something like that.

> "Crippled" is a little strong.  You can simply download the microcode 
> from trailing-edge.

Well, it doesn't work on its own.

> HP isn't really looking to spend resources prosecuting this issue, I'd 
> wager, but Debian isn't looking to compromise their free software 
> principles.  Since the code has never been stated as released into the 
> public domain, it's not.  Get such a statement, and you'll find it in 
> your .debs.
> 
> I don't think the situation will change anytime soon.  The Hobbyist VMS 
> people would probably be a good channel to go through, if you wanted to 
> pursue it, as they've gotten the Hobbyist licenses set up and have lines 
> of communication.  Personally, I'd probably just leave it alone - from a 
> pragmatic POV, it matters little.

It is one more thing a casual user can stumble over.

I was wondering if there might not be another route to take?  How much
work does the console firmware have to do?  Would it be possible to do
something similar to the open source PC BIOS clone that bochs and qemu
use?

As far as I can see, it needs:
 o some vector tables
 o a reset/startup entry point
 o entry points for interrupts/faults
 o possibly some instruction emulation code
 o console I/O routines?
 o console command line/shell?
 o I/O device drivers for harddisks, floppy disks, and tape
 o construction and/or parsing of peripherical unit description tables
 o ... maybe more?

Since simh contains a rather complete CPU emulator, we can probably
dispense with the instruction emulation code (EDITPC, POLY, H
floating-point) which is the part that sounds hardest to me.

Most of this code can be written in C.

-Peter




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