[Simh] Posible bug in version 3.9

[Jordi Guillaumes i Pons]

Hello everyone,

First of all, I want to congratulate and say a big THANK YOU to everyone maintaining and developing SIMH. I grew my computing teeth with VAX machines, and although I own some "physical" VAXen it's a blast to run VMS in my linux boxen...

... and of course, it's also a blast to be able to play with some other old architectures. I've being fiddling with PDP-10 running TOPS-10, and lately also with PDP-11 simulation. I'd like to run RSX-11M in the PDP, but I've not been able to do a successful SYSGEN (perhaps I'm not using the appropriate install kits... who knows). So I've been using RSTS/E in the 11.

I'm testing the upcoming 3.9 release. The new networking code is a bless... I've been able to get rid of some tun/tun tricks using vde (that thing "just works" ;)). The VAX simulator seems to run without a glitch. The PDP one seems to have a pair of problems:

1) RSTS complains about the RT clock, saying it can't use the K11-L. The simulator implements a K11-P iirc, and the source code refers to some initialization magic to make RSTS to use the P clock. I've applied the "magic" and the OS keeps complaining. I'm not sure if that complaint has any effect or if it is just a warning, but what is clear is that there was no warning running the 3.8 version of the emulator.

2) The CPU usage of the simulator does not go down from 100%, even with "set cpu idle".

The second issue is really annoying, basically for temperature reasons. The fans of the host computer keep running all the time... Perhaps there is a config option changed from 3.8 (which ran and idled just fine).

Thanks in advance for your attention :)



Jordi Guillaumes i Pons
jg at jordi.guillaumes.name