[Simh] idle and throttle on Solaris

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Monday, May 19, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Michael Umbricht wrote:
> I am running vms on vax and vax780 in simh V3.9-0 on a Solaris Ultra.
> The SET CPU IDLE and SET THROTTLE commands return "Command not
> allowed"
> and the sim consumes all available cpu cycles on the host. I found some
> information about a similar issue on NetBSD hosts:
> 
> https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1
> 
> Is there a way to modify Solaris to allow idle detection to work as suggested
> in the post above?
> 
> uname -a: SunOS rcs 5.10 Generic_147147-26 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2

This subject was explored about 14 months ago on the HECnet mailing list.

Info we found at the time suggested that you could change or add the following to /etc/system file:

set hires_tick=1
set hires_hz=1000

I don't know if this will work for your OS version.  Let us know.

The above suggestion was made back in March 2013, but I don't see that confirmation that the change actually worked never made it back to the list, so please let us know.

Meanwhile, if you use the latest code from github: https://github.com/simh/simh/archive/master.zip you will be told what simh believes the OS tick size is if it rejects your effort to enable idling.  Clearly this is only one of many other more significant enhancements.

Thanks.

- Mark