[Simh] VAXstation 2000

[Matt]

On 26/05/2011 18:43, Peter Svensson wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2011, Armistead, Jason wrote:
>
>> On the subject of loading VMS or MicroVMS into the emulated VAXstation 
>> 2000 in SIMH, can it be booted from across the Ethernet ?  I honestly 
>> can’t remember if it was possible.  We only ever booted it from floppies 
>> for the initial, RD disks for regular operations, or from the TK50 for 
>> standalone backup.
> Sure, we ran a cluster with 2 diskless VS2000 and an 8350 where all the 
> disks were attached. No problem at all.
>
> Peter

I did some testing with the emulator as a satellite so booting from
'ESA0' should work fine. I've also used the ESA0 to boot from an
Infoserver to load the VXT software. The emulation is not as fast as a
real LANCE (I don't know how it compares to the DEQNA/DEUNA emulation),
which causes the message 'No Connection to Disk Server' to be repeated a
few times when booting as a satellite. I had to use a bit of a hack here
to prevent device timeouts because the software expects the LANCE to
send the packet very quickly (much quicker than the tmxr polling
interval) so the memory controller reschedules the XS device when it
sees a transmit descriptor passed to the LANCE. This is only done when
virtual addressing is disabled (i.e. during boot).

Matt