[TUHS] Re: simh vax and 4.3-quasijarus

[Michael Sokolov]

Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:

> At this point, I am at the simh prompt (">"). I think simh catches
> the halt instruction and goes to the simh prompt when it encounters
> one. I have a VAX 4000/300 at home (unfortunately it doesn't run
> any of the older unixes), and when it halts, I get the >>> prompt
> (differs from simh).

The 4000/300 works like any other uVAX (VAX processor implemented in a single
IC) in this respect: a halt is a special exception that works like regular VAX
macrocode exceptions except that it saves the PC and the PSL in special IPRs
rather than on the stack (so that it doesn't depend on a stack), vectors to the
hardwired ROM address 20040000 rather than through SCB (so that it doesn't
depend on SCB), and MAPEN is cleared (so that it goes to the physical address
20040000 in the ROM rather than whatever that address may be virtually). The
CPU board firmware than displays the halt message and the >>> prompt as
prescribed by the VAX Architecture (DEC STD 032-0). KA650/655 works exactly the
same way.

While I haven't played with simh and don't intend to in the near future (due to
my general lack of interest in emulators), thus I don't claim to be right here,
but from your session logs it appears that simh is not doing the above uVAX
halt exception but instead it handles halts like an 11/780, by "physically"
stopping all instruction execution. That is fine and dandy, the 11/780 way is
certainly cooler, but the problem is it ain't a KA655 any more, and one should
not expect the KA655 boot ROM to work right then (and IMAO it has no right to
report the KA655 SID code either).

> I am pretty sure that I have configured simh correctly, I verified
> this by installing netbsd on the same setup, and it boots ok.

When I took a cursory look at SIMH/VAX, which consisted only of glancing at its
brief documentation, I read that the KA655 ROM image it comes with is not the
real one but hacked to work with the poor emulator. This suggests to me that
you are able to boot some OSes because Bob has gutted the (quite complicated)
KA655 console and boot logic to the bare minimum he had emulated. I wouldn't be
surprised if he hacked out the KA655 diagnostic executive almost entirely, so
that on "power-up" one goes through an absolutely minimal init sequence without
a single halt/unhalt cycle occuring (of which on a real KA655 several occur on
every power-up during diagnostics), gets to the >>> prompt, and then when
booting, runs VMB, unhalts once (the SIMH probably doesn't even know that it
unhalts, as the uVAX unhalt is simply an RFI: on real hardware it knows that
this RFI is an unhalt and lights the RUN LED because the SSC chip compares
instruction fetch addresses against the halt range and detects the unhalt, but
I doubt that SIMH emulates this), and then it all goes well (cross your fingers
three times!) never goes through a proper KA655 halt/unhalt again. But if
something goes wrong in the boot and VMB's error handler gets invoked, SIMH's
very poor man's emulation is not prepared for it.

> My only problem seems to be getting the bootblocks right. I have
> heard that someone managed to install quasijarus0a on simh, so it
> must be me somehow screwing the bootblocks.

But the rub is that because of SIMH talking the KA655 talk but not walking the
KA655 walk, you can't see what exactly is the problem with your bootblocks:
VMB's error messages aren't displayed.

MS