[Simh] Simh and OpenVMS Integrity V8.4 Network Support issues

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Thursday, March 01, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Matt wrote:
> > For this reason I did try with Matt's porting, unfortunatelly without
> 
> > success (I have downloaded the new pcap library from site
> > http://9track.net/simh/pcap, as reported by my previous email).
> >
> > I'm very interested to run SIMH with network support on-top of the
> > Integrity platform so any hints or workaround will be very appreciated.
> >
> 
> Hopefully I'll have a new version available soon with a fix. What version of HP
> C did you use to build the PCAP library? I only ask because there was a
> problem on the Alpha platform that I did a fix for, which only occured when
> using a particular verion of the compiler.

Well, I looked into this.  I've got an rx2600 recently acquired cheap on eBay.  I updated the firmware on this system to the latest before installing VMS and doing any testing.

I started with the vms-pcap.zip downloaded from: https://github.com/markpizz/simh/downloads

Everything worked as expected.  No crashes and full Ethernet behavior.

I then took the vms-pcap.zip from http://www.9track.net/simh/pcap

I expected these to be the same since I worked with Matt last year when I picked up his fixes and merged them into the code on github.

They were not the same.  The code from http://www.9track.net/simh/pcap produced the crashes which Maurizio described.

Looking for what was different, I compared the source.  The code on github.com had a version of pcapvcm.c which had comments describing it as Version X-3.  The code from 9track.net had comments describing it as Version X-2.  There was also a difference in snprintf.c which cleaned up compiler warnings on some platforms.  Additionally, there were an extra file in the zip file from github.com called 0readme_pcap-VMS.txt which describes the relative directory structure the pcap-vms code should have with respect to the simh source which references it (via simh's  descrip.mms file).

I'm not sure why Matt's website has the older code in its zip file since I got the code on github from Matt.  The right answer seems to use the code from github.

Meanwhile, I also looked at the libpcap provided with OpenVMS 8.4 TCP/IP 5.7 ECO3.  This libpcap implementation does NOT have pcap_sendpacket, so it won't be useful for simh networking.

- Mark Pizzolato