[Simh] Containerized simh: an experiment

[Jordi Guillaumes i Pons]

Hello,

Perhaps someone could find an use for something I’ve built lately. I have made several Docker images for SIMH ands some freely available operating systems for the VAX and the PDP-11 (basically, BSD and UNIX). The docker images can be pulled from the docker hub, with the following names:

jguillaumes/simh-allsims	:	Just all the SIMH binaries packed with a ultralight linux distro
jguillaumes/simh-pdpv7		:	The pdp11 binary plus a ready to run UNIX V7 image
jguillaumes/simh-pdpbsd		:	The pdp11 binary plus a ready to run BSD 2.11 with networking enabled.
jguillaumes/simh-vaxbsd		:	The vax780 binary plus a ready to run BSD 4.3 with networking enabled.
jguillaumes/simh-vaxnbsd	:	The vax binary plus a ready to run NetBSD 6.0 with networking enabled.

All the images work in similar way:

docker run —name <containername> -p 2323:2323 -p 2324:2324 -it jguillaumes/simh-xxxxx

Then just follow the instructions. Do not forget to properly shut down the system. And then to restart it:

docker start <containername> && docker attach <containername>

All the images expose a terminal multiplexer as port 2323 and the SIMH console as port 2324. Networking works (mostly) out of the box. If you run more than one container at the same time, you have to map the ports to different numbers (ie -p 32023:2323 -p 32024:2324 for example) in each container.

The Dockerfiles are in github if someone wants to play with them

git://github.com/jguillaumes/simhdocker

Please take into account this is a personal pet project. It is not an official part of simh, so if someone finds a bug, don’t open a SIMH issue UNLESS YOU CAN REPRODUCE IT IN A NON-CONTAINERIZED ENVIRONMENT.

Enjoy!

PS: More details in my semi abandoned blog: http://ancientbits.blogspot.com/2016/05/containerizing-simh-bsd-in-box.html