[Simh] VAX and disk device size oddness

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Friday, February 15, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Lennert Van Alboom wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 07:45:09AM -0800, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm wrote:
> > > > RAUSER is what you need. I don't think simh even knows of the RA73...
> > >
> > > I would, but that doesn't give me decent size disks... after some
> > > trial & error it seems like I'm hitting the 2GB barrier. RAUSER=2047
> > > works, RAUSER=2048 fails. I don't suppose I can work around this on a
> 32bit host system, or can I?
> >
> > A 32bit kernel should not be a limiting factor since MANY 32bit OS
> > environments have been capable of disk file access to files larger
> > than 2GB for a very long time.
> 
> Well, I'm actually using raw disk devices mapped to SIMH. So instead of
> ATTACH
> RQ1 /path/to/file, I have ATTACH RQ1 /dev/mapper/bla. But that shouldn't
> make a difference - the vax process can write to it, and the RA90 "system"
> disk works fine.

This doesn't matter yet since you are encountering the issue before you attempt to attach.

Meanwhile, the latest code has the native ability to access raw devices which you may want to try once this size issue gets resolved.

> The host is an Apple iBook G4, 1.2GHz PowerPC G4. The host OS is Debian
> Linux ("testing" aka soon to be stable 7.0, 3.2.0 kernel).

> I checked the docs and they mentioned USE_INT64 and USE_ADDR64, but
> those options were already passed to gcc by default.

As you discovered, No specific effort should be needed on your part.  The makefile should just work.

> > If changes need to be made to naturally support your platform, we can
> > readily add these to the code base.  Please pickup the latest code
> > from https://github.com/simh/simh/archive/master.zip and let me know
> > the answers to the above questions and if you still have a problem if you
> merely:
> >
> >
> > 	$ mkdir simh
> > 	$ cd simh
> > 	$ unzip ../master.zip
> > 	$ make vax
> 
> Just did this - running the "master" vax binary still gives "Invalid argument"
> when using RAUSER with a size over 2047M.

I don't see how this can be happening.  The code at line 315 of sim_fio.c should enable > 2GB file support for any linux platform as long as the simulator is being built with USE_INT64 and USE_ADDR64.

Can you send the output from make produced while building the simulator.

We can take this offline until we resolve this issue.  I tried to contact your directly but you didn't seem to get my email.  Maybe if you send directly to me we'll open up a hole in the spam filtering...

Thanks.

- Mark Pizzolato