I got my Raspberry Pi a few days ago too. I too have had few problems,
although for some reason the download of libpcap took an extraordinary
amount of time. I have built the 780 emulation, along with two modifications
of my own, difference disk files, and a DMC11 emulation.
I am running the Pi now 24 hours a day as my HECnet router (node VAX780 at
5.8) using the bridge running on a server that I already run 24 hours a day.
The virtual disk files are stored on the server and I use SMB to access them
from the Raspberry Pi, partly because the 8GB SD card I planned to use did
not work and I had to use a 4GB one, partly because I have heard that SD
performance is poor.
I am not as good on unix these days as I used to be, is there an easy way to
get SIMH to start up automatically on booting the Pi?
I like the idea of a cluster of Pis, might get a few more at some point and
try that myself.
Regards
Rob
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-
hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Mark Benson
Sent: 03 June 2012 22:21
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?
On 4 May 2012, at 00:07, Boyanich, Alastair wrote:
Sampsa:
Interesting. Be sure to set up the idle detection in the simh.ini for
your appropriate OS (netbsd/TheoLinux/VMS/Ultrix/etc..) or it'll run
the CPU flat-out all the time and potentially get hot. I'm really
curious to hear how 'hot' the R-Pi's get under load. Mine's still on
order.
Beautiful idea.
I got my Raspsberry Pi Thursday. It runs SimH 3.9.0 flawlessly under the
provided Debian Linux 'squeeze' distribution from a SD Card. The I/O on
the
RPi isn't fantastic from SD Card, it just about manages 5.5MB/s by most
people's benchmarks which is rather slow.
libpcap and screen are installable from the provided arm6l repositories so
no
need for compiling those. Once I did that I just downloaded the source
zip,
unzipped it into a directory and used 'make' to build, just like normal.
Built
fine and runs perfectly.
PDP-11 simulation is plenty snappy enough running RSX-11M Plus 4.2 on a
simulated 11/83 with 2048kW of RAM. I have DECNet 4.0 (Phase IV) working
on there too and it works fine.
VAX KA655X simulation is... sluggish. I'm used to running it on 1.xGHz
x86_64
CPUs (Atom or AMD) with fast hard drives or SATA SSD. The CPU speed
makes it slow but imagine it's as fast or faster than a real late model
VAX. It's
by no means perishingly annoying, it just takes a little thinking between
operations. I think I may be spoilt as I've never used a real VAX.
Overall so far I'm very impressed with the RasPi and it will fulfil the
roles I
need for it. When I get hold of a few more I am going to try and build a
VMS
cluster that uses less than 6W :) I will also have one permanently running
a
PDP-11 (something that I've not managed since I had my Cobalt Qube2
running) RSX-11MP system.
Oh and CPU Idle works just fine in PDP-11 and VMS-VAX simulations. To be
honest even when I compiled all the simulator binaries for SimH (as a
stress
test) and when I was running the SYSGEN in RSX-11M it barely got much
worse temperature-wise than hot to touch a the CPU. On a board that only
uses 300mA with no USB and Ethernet active it hardly has a lot of energy
to
dissipate as heat in the first place!
I'm gonna have a LOT of fun with these :D
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.
I tried ti do this a week back but somethings still broken. I'm trying to get Area 6 back to HECNet somehow but I am stuck because I can't reach Steve Davidson.
I may drop back to using the bridge for now, if that will still work.
On 13 Apr 2012, at 19:26, Steve Davidson wrote:
The following areas need to change their addresses for their link to SG1
to work:
3, 52, 59 and the two area 6 nodes.
In addition, the nodes in the 19.3xx range are still missing.
The new address is: 69.21.253.158 (bridge.declab.net)
-Steve
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.
On 4 May 2012, at 00:07, Boyanich, Alastair wrote:
Sampsa:
Interesting. Be sure to set up the idle detection in the simh.ini for
your appropriate OS (netbsd/TheoLinux/VMS/Ultrix/etc..) or it'll run the
CPU flat-out all the time and potentially get hot. I'm really curious to
hear how 'hot' the R-Pi's get under load. Mine's still on order.
Beautiful idea.
I got my Raspsberry Pi Thursday. It runs SimH 3.9.0 flawlessly under the provided Debian Linux 'squeeze' distribution from a SD Card. The I/O on the RPi isn't fantastic from SD Card, it just about manages 5.5MB/s by most people's benchmarks which is rather slow.
libpcap and screen are installable from the provided arm6l repositories so no need for compiling those. Once I did that I just downloaded the source zip, unzipped it into a directory and used 'make' to build, just like normal. Built fine and runs perfectly.
PDP-11 simulation is plenty snappy enough running RSX-11M Plus 4.2 on a simulated 11/83 with 2048kW of RAM. I have DECNet 4.0 (Phase IV) working on there too and it works fine.
VAX KA655X simulation is... sluggish. I'm used to running it on 1.xGHz x86_64 CPUs (Atom or AMD) with fast hard drives or SATA SSD. The CPU speed makes it slow but imagine it's as fast or faster than a real late model VAX. It's by no means perishingly annoying, it just takes a little thinking between operations. I think I may be spoilt as I've never used a real VAX.
Overall so far I'm very impressed with the RasPi and it will fulfil the roles I need for it. When I get hold of a few more I am going to try and build a VMS cluster that uses less than 6W :) I will also have one permanently running a PDP-11 (something that I've not managed since I had my Cobalt Qube2 running) RSX-11MP system.
Oh and CPU Idle works just fine in PDP-11 and VMS-VAX simulations. To be honest even when I compiled all the simulator binaries for SimH (as a stress test) and when I was running the SYSGEN in RSX-11M it barely got much worse temperature-wise than hot to touch a the CPU. On a board that only uses 300mA with no USB and Ethernet active it hardly has a lot of energy to dissipate as heat in the first place!
I'm gonna have a LOT of fun with these :D
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.
I'm trying to get in touch with Steve, is he around at the moment? I e-mailed his address a while back but got no response.
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.
On 2012-05-16 19.02, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 05/16/2012 09:12 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
So I just realized that I have V1.0 of the DECserver 300 image, and
there exists also a V2, which can talk TCP/IP. Does anyone have that
version around? Latest seems to be V2.2c.
http://www.neurotica.com/misc/SH1601ENG.SYS
That is v2.2C.
Please let me know when you have it so I can remote it from the server.
Thanks. Got it.
Johnny
On 05/16/2012 09:12 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
So I just realized that I have V1.0 of the DECserver 300 image, and
there exists also a V2, which can talk TCP/IP. Does anyone have that
version around? Latest seems to be V2.2c.
http://www.neurotica.com/misc/SH1601ENG.SYS
That is v2.2C.
Please let me know when you have it so I can remote it from the server.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
So I just realized that I have V1.0 of the DECserver 300 image, and there exists also a V2, which can talk TCP/IP. Does anyone have that version around? Latest seems to be V2.2c.
Johnny
Sampsa:
Interesting. Be sure to set up the idle detection in the simh.ini for
your appropriate OS (netbsd/TheoLinux/VMS/Ultrix/etc..) or it'll run the
CPU flat-out all the time and potentially get hot. I'm really curious to
hear how 'hot' the R-Pi's get under load. Mine's still on order.
Beautiful idea.
Al.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wednesday, 2 May 2012 8:34 PM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?
I'm toying with moving GORVAX onto a Raspberry Pi and SIMH? Anyone
played
with this yet? What's the performance like?
Sampsa
Its been a year or so since I've messed with the ARM, but I believe I just used NFS instead of transferring the disc image to the sd card.. I do recall that doing ANYTHING else during times of high SD activity was ill-advised.
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Kevin Reynolds <tpresence at hotmail.com> wrote:
After I saw this message, I set up simh and put up simh with unix v6 using the provided pdp11 binary. I didn't notice a significant difference between running v6 on the pi from running it on a modern machine with real disk and ram. Everything seemed to work as expected.
I set up a vms configuration to test it out, and, disk acces from the sd wasn't so happy. Just transferring my disk images to the pi took forever at ~1.0MB/sec. This was with a class 10 card, so although its fast, alot of people say they are also buggy. I haven't had issues with reliability. If you do ANYTHING else on the pi during xfer, it slows even further. If you do any package management during transfers, the transfer will stall entirely. With the current operating systems, I think multi-function purposes of the pi are not very viable. The biggest limitation I believe is the SD card. This may get better with a disk hanging off of USB. I do not think there is a way to BOOT from usb and exclude sd entirely at this point. I may try to put swap on a USB disk, since I believe the SD is the primary hangup.
1) I used the debian OS provided by the pi foundation, as it was the most complete and reliable
2) simh is already in the armel package archives, and can be installed to the pi with "apt-get install simh"
If you dedicate your pi to simh, it probably won't cause you unhappiness.
Kevin
> From: sampsa at mac.com
> Subject: [HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?
> Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 13:34:00 +0300
> To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
>
> I'm toying with moving GORVAX onto a Raspberry Pi and SIMH? Anyone played with this yet? What's the performance like?
>
> Sampsa
>
>
After I saw this message, I set up simh and put up simh with unix v6 using the provided pdp11 binary. I didn't notice a significant difference between running v6 on the pi from running it on a modern machine with real disk and ram. Everything seemed to work as expected.
I set up a vms configuration to test it out, and, disk acces from the sd wasn't so happy. Just transferring my disk images to the pi took forever at ~1.0MB/sec. This was with a class 10 card, so although its fast, alot of people say they are also buggy. I haven't had issues with reliability. If you do ANYTHING else on the pi during xfer, it slows even further. If you do any package management during transfers, the transfer will stall entirely. With the current operating systems, I think multi-function purposes of the pi are not very viable. The biggest limitation I believe is the SD card. This may get better with a disk hanging off of USB. I do not think there is a way to BOOT from usb and exclude sd entirely at this point. I may try to put swap on a USB disk, since I believe the SD is the primary hangup.
1) I used the debian OS provided by the pi foundation, as it was the most complete and reliable
2) simh is already in the armel package archives, and can be installed to the pi with "apt-get install simh"
If you dedicate your pi to simh, it probably won't cause you unhappiness.
Kevin
> From: sampsa at mac.com
> Subject: [HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?
> Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 13:34:00 +0300
> To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
>
> I'm toying with moving GORVAX onto a Raspberry Pi and SIMH? Anyone played with this yet? What's the performance like?
>
> Sampsa
>
>
