[pups] Troubles with 2.9BSD on 11/34a

[Christian Corti]

Hi,

I finally managed to install 2.9BSD on a real 11/34 with two RL01s;
I used KSERVE on RT-11 to transfer a boot disk image created
with E11 to a RL01 disk. I did the same for the /usr partition to be
mounted.
(It was hard to find out that I had to write a little program to convert
the usr.tar file into a tape file for E11 and un-tar it to the disk
image. It didn't work by mounting the tar-file as /dev/rl2 and doing tar
xvf /dev/rrl2; tar would hang immediatly or after the first few files.)

Good news:
I can boot Unix, mount /usr, edit /etc/dtab with vi etc.
Multiuser works too, with my notebook running MS-DOS Kermit in VT100
mode as the console and a real ADM3a attached to a second serial port.

Bad news:
Using the system is a real pain because some (no specific) programs will
cause either a "memory fault - core dumped" or a "bus error - core
dumped". E.g. calling "/lib/cpp" fails, but "/lib/cpp foo" says something
like "foo not found" and terminates without fault.
Very strange too: Sometimes when I start "awk" without parameters (just
for playing around) I get an error like "error on line 6: ..." as if the
shell tried to interpret the binary as a shell script!?
"fsck ..." occasionally fails after stage 5 with a memory fault.
"ps" fails, but "ps axl" works (or vice versa); or both (doesn't) work.
And so on :-(((

But:
There are no errors running RT-11 (it runs just fine) and RSX11/M (as I
could test it). The MAINDEC test programs for CPU and memory give no
errors (perhaps I should let them run much longer?).
There are no errors with these disk images and E11 configured to emulate
the real 11/34.

The configuration:
CPU: PDP11/34a without FPP
memory: 128 kw (one single non-DEC board)
M78?? parity module
Programmer's console
DL11-W for the console terminal
RL11 controller (revised version)
M9812 bootstrap/terminator with DL boot rom

Addresses and vectors are set up correctly.


What is going on? Did anyone have similar problems?
I suspect that either the memory or the MMU has a random behaviour,
but I'm not sure.


Christian

-----------------------------------------
EMail:
Christian.Corti at studserv.uni-stuttgart.de

Universität Stuttgart
Fakultät für Informatik
-----------------------------------------


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