[Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Jonathan Willams]

I think a more useful solution would be to engineer FUSE filesystems for various file system formats. It removes the necessity to modify simh or the guest OS.

> On Apr 20, 2016, at 12:42 PM, Ken Cornetet <Ken.Cornetet at kimballelectronics.com> wrote:
> 
> I think I wasn’t clear on what I meant.
>  
> Simh would have an FTP server built in. In your simh control file, you’d attach a disk (or tape, or drum) and add an option that would make that block device available to the FTP server as a certain virtual directory name. A user id and password would also be specified.
>  
> An FTP client would connect to simh using the specified user/password and do a “cd” to the virtual directory name as specified in the attach options. The FTP client could then read, write, and erase files in the filesystem on that block device file.
>  
> Obviously, simh can’t know how to read/write/erase files for every file system out there, so we’d need a very simple file system that would be simple to code for both simh and guest os applications. I like LIF because it is designed for pretty much exactly this. HP designed it as a way to transfer files across their various operating systems (and even  calculators).
>  
> It wouldn’t have to be LIF – we could design our own from scratch if desired. But LIF is super simple and a user level utility could be coded up on pretty much any guest OS (well, any guest OS that allows block level access to devices).
>  
>  
>  
> From: Ken Cornetet 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 11:43 AM
> To: simh at trailing-edge.com <mailto:simh at trailing-edge.com>
> Subject: Way out idea for simh
>  
> A common theme on this list is how to get files copied between the host and the emulated machines. I have a crazy idea for a simh feature to help in that regard: Add an FTP server to simh that would write to a “universal” file system on a simh block device file (disk, tape, drum)  that the guest OS would have attached. You could fire up your favorite ftp client and copy files into and out of this file system.
>  
> Obviously, the guest OS would need to have tools written to read/write this universal file system, but with a simple enough file system, that wouldn’t be a huge hurdle. I have to admit, outside of unix and RTE, I have no notion of how many operating systems that run on simh emulated machines allow direct disk access. I am assuming there is a way to do it on most all of them. If not, tape or drum could be an option.
>  
> For this “universal” file system, I nominate Hewlett-Packard’s LIF. It is simple and well documented. A fixed flat directory at the beginning of the image, fixed size directory entries, and linear space allocation (no allocation tables).
>  
> I don’t expect it would be trivial to add an FTP server to simh, but it could be handy. Just food for thought.
>  
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