[Simh] Success with SIMH VAX on OS X 10.6 Intel

[Sean O'Banion]

All,

I have had some success with SIMH VAX on OS X  that required a couple of steps that were not obvious,
and thought I should pass them along.

This is on a Mac Mini Intel Core2Duo with 3GB running OS X 10.6.8 and Parallels 6, and SIMH v38-1.


From Steve Hoffmans site, two entries got me a long way:
http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922
http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/974

Besides his recommended changes, I chose to use the version of LIBPCAP included with OS X, so the makefile entry for building with network functionality became:

  NETWORK_OPT = -DUSE_NETWORK -isystem /usr/local/include /usr/lib/libpcap.A.dylib


In spite of all that help, I could not build an executable:

  export OSTYPE
  make USE_NETWORK=1 vax

gave me the fatal error:

  ld: library not found for -lrt
  collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
  make: *** [BIN/vax] Error 1

I found that the library rt, specified by the -lrt link option, was not being found.
I had to change the makefile from:

      OS_CCDEFS = -lrt -lm -D_GNU_SOURCE
to
      OS_CCDEFS = -lm -D_GNU_SOURCE

and then succeeded to get an executable that would boot VMS 7.3.


However, I could not connect from VMS out to my local IP network at home with TCPIP 5.1 ECO 5.
Although four network devices where found by the simulator, none would enable any connectivity:
  sim> show xq eth
  ETH devices:
    0  en0   (No description available)
    1  vnic0 (No description available)
    2  en1   (No description available)
    3  vnic1 (No description available)

I suspected that LIBPCAP or Parallels was getting in my way.
After struggling with Parallels for a few days, which was new to me, with no success, I decided to investigate LIBPCAP.
Besides the version that comes with OS X, I also downloaded version 1.1.1 with no luck.
While investigating that, I tripped over Ton van Overbeek's posting:
http://www.mail-archive.com/simh@trailing-edge.com/msg00320.html
This post includes his patches to the SIMH eithersim.c,
and building with these changes I get an executable that boots VMS and connects out to the Internet.

In particular, I was able to get to the the HP site for downloading VAX VMS kits via information from John Egolf with FTP.
One cavet about the FTP access to the HP site:  the username is case sensitive.
Because I chose to use the DCL command line FTP with /USERNAME=
the username string must be enclosed in double quotes.


Sean