Open larsbrinkhoff opened 6 years ago
The KS10 for which this is destined has a DZ11, a Chaosnet board, and an Ethernet card which Bawden said was someone's project for a while (drivers in a personal directory).
Is the Ethernet card an Interlan NI1010? We may be able to get that to work, but probably at a later time.
Doesn't that machine have an ITS name (and CONFIG entry) already? :-)
The lars/lc-its is a work in progress. It's still only using one RP06.
Of course the machine had a name, but that one is well known and has built-in expectations. We want to start fresh, with more disks hosting more software and the possibility of allowing public accounts. I thought I had sent the LC config to Lars several months ago. If not, I apologize; I last touched the build in January 2018, then got buried in a different OS and architecture altogether.
The microcode RAM file is built fresh from ITS microcode sources. It's not binary identical to the one that came from here: http://www.cosmic.com/u/mirian/its/files/minsys.tape
@blipvert, do you know where the .; RAM RAM file on the minsys tape came from?
I have eight RP06 images built for LC ITS. I used the KLH10 emulator for this, since it supports Chaosnet. Unfortunately, it only has a stub device for DZ11 so I haven't tested that.
I haven't considered the file format. I believe the disk emulator uses the SIMH format, so I think I need to rebuild with KLH10 using that. Then I can cross check the images with SIMH, but I'm quite sure it'll complain about CH11 missing.
It just occurred to me, we should probably increase NUDSL to have more user directories available. The current value of 500. is large for an ITS, but I guess LC will be even larger in terms of disk space.
Yes, the MDE uses SimH format for disk images, but KLH10 is agnostic about disk images. If instead of declaring a disk "DBD9", you declare it "DLW8", you get a SimH-compatible disk image and don't have to worry about CH11 not existing on the SimH KS10 emulation.
I'm using DLW8 now, and verified that SIMH likes this format. The disk image will boot to DSKDMP.
I see the image files vary in size. Does MDE need them padded with zeroes?
Possible issues:
I think we can claim the microcode is verified now. The version running is freshly built from source code.
Because LC uses an LCM+L MDE rather than DEC spinning rust, it may be that the KS can handle RP07 images (where real RP07s are too fast for the KS-10's Unibus). At some point we should test this out.
I understand the MDE doesn't emulate a tape drive. That is unfortunate, because backing up to tape is a convenient way to move files from one system to another. Or the same system with a different disk configuration.
There is a variant, the MTE, which works as 8 TM78 controllers with a single drive each (because subunits are difficult to implement in the Xilinx). The KS-10 does not support the TM78, only the TM03/TM02 style controller. One of the engineers is working on making the MTE talk TM03, but it's not high on his priority list.
I believe RP07 support was added at the very last minute and never tested at MIT and hence quite possibly never used on a real KS10 running ITS. I don't know if anyone ran it with KLH10 or SIMH; SV and UP both use RP06.
I used an RP07 early in my experiments with your Github project, under KLH10 and SimH. It worked OK as I recall for a single-disk system, but multiple RP07s got into trouble very quickly. Since this was not a priority at the museum, I did not look into what was actually failing. Seems like something for a younger hacker to think about.
I'm breeding a young hacker, but he's only five.
CC @SMJ. I suppose most issues have been resolved now.
LC ITS is to be a new KS10 configuration:
CC @rmaldersoniii.