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
>
>
Ah very cool... should make the bridging easy...
The zipit is/was, I believe, 300MHz or so out of the box... but only 32MB of RAM if i recall. It was a bit slow perhaps, but certainly felt more like lower-end "real" hardware as compared to simh on a newer machine (which can obviously turn blazingly-fast "VAX" i/o in the right configuration).
I'd seen talk (perhaps by Sampsa in this group), of an fpga turned PDP, that sounded very interesting as well... I don't suppose anyone has seen this come about?
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:01 AM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
On May 2, 2012, at 8:16 AM, Joe Ferraro wrote:
> I did the same with a zipit z2 (got them for $12USD), which is arm (I believe the pi is as well?!).. honestly, the performance felt much more realistic than the untuned linux/simh on a modern machine... and for around 100mW, it is / was hard to beat. The one issue I had was getting the bridge to work over wifi - I didn't have time (at the time) to tinker...
Yes, the pi is an ARM processor, with 256 MB of RAM. It doesn't have wifi, but it does (in the "B" model) have 10/100 Ethernet.
paul
On May 2, 2012, at 8:16 AM, Joe Ferraro wrote:
I did the same with a zipit z2 (got them for $12USD), which is arm (I believe the pi is as well?!).. honestly, the performance felt much more realistic than the untuned linux/simh on a modern machine... and for around 100mW, it is / was hard to beat. The one issue I had was getting the bridge to work over wifi - I didn't have time (at the time) to tinker...
Yes, the pi is an ARM processor, with 256 MB of RAM. It doesn't have wifi, but it does (in the "B" model) have 10/100 Ethernet.
paul
