Hi, A while ago the power supply in my VAXstation 4000/96 died and rather than fix it I decided to move it to a Raspberry Pi 3.
The VAXstation has a 100MHz CPU and the RPi has a 1.2GHz CPU - about 120 times faster. Yet the performance of SIMH basically sucks, especially when logging in to the emulated VAX via SSH. On the real VAXstation, establishing an SSH sesison was slow -- it would take the better part of a minute -- but once established it was very usable and quite capable of running a DECterm to an X11 display on a remote PC over an SSH tunnel. On the Raspberry Pi the SSH session establishment takes several minutes and trying to run a DECterm is painful to say the least. I was hoping that the RPi's much faster CPU would compensate for the emulation overhead, particularly on a very CPU-intensive task like SSH session establishment, so this result is rather disappointing. I could perhaps put up with those issues but there two other, more fundamental problems when starting the simulation. The first one is, the emulation can't be started automatically; I have to run it interactively in a terminal window. If I try to automate the startup using, for example $ ./vax < vax.ini the VAX console boot ROM fails a self test and refuses to boot into VMS. If I type the commands from vax.ini by hand, it works fine. A similar issue occurs if I try to load the boot console NVR from a file: the VAX console boot ROM fails its self-test and won't boot VMS. The second problem is that the simulated VAX is *always* a VAXserver 3900. Trying to SET CPU MODEL=MicroVAX just doesn't work, so my VAX-VMS licence PAK's availability table code don't suit the machine any more. The SIMH version is currently MicroVAX 3900 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 733ac0d9 I tried downloading the latest from Github (git commit id: 8077d4de) but it didn't fix the startup issues so I haven't persisted with it. Before starting this exercise I had read several reports of people successfullly using Raspberry Pi to run an emulated VAX so I have to think something is very broken in my RPi environment, but I'm not sure what I should be looking for. FWIW the Raspberry Pi is running Linux pieric 4.14.52-v7+ #1123 SMP Wed Jun 27 17:35:49 BST 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux and the file /etc/os-release is: PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)" NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux" VERSION_ID="9" VERSION="9 (stretch)" ID=raspbian ID_LIKE=debian HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"; SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"; BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"; SIMH was built with "gcc (Raspbian 6.3.0-18+rpi1+deb9u1) 6.3.0 20170516". Here is the full SHOW VERSION output: sim> show version MicroVAX 3900 simulator V4.0-0 Beta Simulator Framework Capabilities: 64b data 64b addresses Threaded Ethernet Packet transports:PCAP:TAP:NAT:UDP Idle/Throttling support is available Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) support RAW disk and CD/DVD ROM support Asynchronous I/O support (Lock free asynchronous event queue) Asynchronous Clock support FrontPanel API Version 5 Host Platform: Compiler: GCC 6.3.0 20170516 Simulator Compiled as C arch: ARM (Release Build) on Nov 9 2017 at 08:04:00 Memory Access: Little Endian Memory Pointer Size: 32 bits Large File (>2GB) support SDL Video support: No Video Support RegEx support for EXPECT commands OS clock resolution: 1ms Time taken by msleep(1): 1ms OS: Linux pieric 4.14.52-v7+ #1123 SMP Wed Jun 27 17:35:49 BST 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux git commit id: 733ac0d9 The later version (which I'm not running because it didn't fix the startup issues) is: sim> show version MicroVAX 3900 simulator V4.0-0 Current Simulator Framework Capabilities: 64b data 64b addresses Threaded Ethernet Packet transports:PCAP:TAP:NAT:UDP Idle/Throttling support is available Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) support RAW disk and CD/DVD ROM support Asynchronous I/O support (Lock free asynchronous event queue) Asynchronous Clock support FrontPanel API Version 12 Host Platform: Compiler: GCC 6.3.0 20170516 Simulator Compiled as C arch: ARM (Release Build) on Jun 17 2018 at 21:12:47 Memory Access: Little Endian Memory Pointer Size: 32 bits Large File (>2GB) support SDL Video support: No Video Support RegEx support for EXPECT commands OS clock resolution: 1ms Time taken by msleep(1): 1ms OS: Linux pieric 4.14.52-v7+ #1123 SMP Wed Jun 27 17:35:49 BST 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux git commit id: 8077d4de git commit time: 2018-06-17T08:37:08+02:00 Thanks, Jeremy Begg +---------------------------------------------------------+ | VSM Software Services Pty. Ltd. | | http://www.vsm.com.au/ | |---------------------------------------------------------| | P.O.Box 402, Walkerville, | E-Mail: jer...@vsm.com.au | | South Australia 5081 | Phone: +61 8 8221 5188 | |---------------------------| Mobile: 0414 422 947 | | A.C.N. 068 409 156 | FAX: +61 8 8221 7199 | +---------------------------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
