[TUHS] PDP-11/70 SPL

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> > 	SPL	0
> > 	WAIT
> > 
> > you don't lose by having the interrupt happen between the SPL and the 
> > WAIT?
> 
> Hmm. A good point. If you depend on WAIT waking you up at an interrupt, 
> then you need SPL to block here. But this also means that you must be at 
> SPL 7 before any of this, otherwise you are still exposed to this 
> problem (nothing says that the interrupt won't happen before the SPL as 
> well).

SPL 7 was only used by the clock interrupt, and levels 1-3 were never used 
in Unix.  spl4() was slow devices, spl5() was fast devices, but I can't 
remember how spl6() was used (blame my fading memory).

In other words, spl7() was diable all interrupts, spl0() was enable all 
interrupts, and spl4()-spl6() meant "you'd better be doing something more 
important than what I'm doing" (per The Book).

And that was the beauty; even the clock couldn't interrupt, so bye-bye all 
scheduling...  And the HALT key, being implemented as an interrupt, 
as well...

I'm just starting to think that this "bug" was left undocumented on 
porpoise, so perhaps someone read the engineering drawings?

> In general, I would say that this is not the way I would write code, but 
> checking in RSX and 2.11BSD I can tell that RSX do not use this pattern, 
> and does a WAIT without any SPL, while 2.11BSD do an SPL 0 followed by 
> WAIT. And the routine in 2.11BSD is also called at SPL 7.

See above comment; perhaps they believed the handbook?  Heck, even the 
published Unibus spec was known to be wrong, in order to keep 3rd-party 
kit out of it (it was something subtle to do with buss timing, so 
sometimes the card worked, and sometimes it didn't, doing wonders for 
your reputation).

> So obviously, both ways have been done, and 2.11BSD will work 
> potentially with a slight degration if the SPL do not block interrupts. 
> It will still work fine, as you will, at a minimum, get an interrupt at 
> the next clock tick, which will wake it up. But it might possibly be 
> sitting in a WAIT slightly longer than required.

Slightly longer?  I think it was Lions himself who used to teach us that a 
lost interrupt is nasty :-(

> RSX in fact just loops after the WAIT. If an interrupt should cause the 
> system to be able to do something more productive, it will not return to 
> the idle loop. So yes, it also detects in the interrupt exit processing, 
> that it was/is in the idle loop.

Also keep in mind that the company who wrote RSX-11 also designed the 
hardware, and thus had a vested interest.  Anyone here remember overlapped 
seeks on the RK-11 failing under Unix, but not under RSX, so therefore it 
must be Unix's problem?  I hammered those buggers until they supplied some 
new diag routines that pretty much demonstrated the bug...  RSX of course 
never used overlapped seeks on the RK-11, so MAINDEC never tested for it.

This has nothing to do with how "SPL 0; WAIT" etc was implemented in Unix; 
we are talking hardware here.

> I still haven't had time to investigate properly. But at least processor 
> and chip manuals do not say that SPL will block interrupts. But that is 
> no guarantee that it don't in reality.

Sigh; again, there are far too many witnesses that showed that it did; not 
wishing to be offensive or anything, but did you work for DEC back then?

Ah; John Dodson: are you here?  Did you try that little program on your 
11/70?

Ian Johnson, are you here, when I "accidentally" crashed your machine, and 
after I fessed up to it, you referred to me as a vulgar term for the 
female genitalia, then promptly hung up?

I think that Kev Hill can attest to this, and I know that Kevin Dawson (I 
think) tried it on my /40 as well; then again, his "outside" group were 
always trying to hack into us, and my job was to keep the barbarians away 
from the gate (which is how I got my first job at UNSW: it was better to 
have me inside than outside...).

What about you, MarioE, ChrisT, and RonDeJ?  (And UNSW actually employed 
most of 'em.)  It's quite likely that ChrisM, GregR, and PeterI knew about 
it as well, along with possibly anyone on the old AUUG list, where the 
exploit was published, IIRC.

Christ, but this is starting to sound like some religion or other.

Yes, Warren, I need to know that should I write that history, that we 
won't both get sued; how long is the Statute of Limitations anyway?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."