[HECnet] Trying to build SIMH from git (on OpenIndiana)

On 03/13/2013 05:32 PM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm wrote: First of all, Cory...have you tried using Sun's compiler? It kicks the snot out of GCC for SPARC code generation. I did give you a copy. I would suggest that this would be a good idea. I have an old SparcStation which I fire up once every few years to test simh on a Big Endian platform. It has a Linux disk and a Solaris disk (I don't recall the version). I do not have a sun C compiler. The last time I fired it up (more than a year ago) the basic testing worked out fine but I noticed that some things were so slow it was practically unusable. I isolated some slow behavior down to an operation which walked across a 64MB chunk of VAX memory one byte at a time. The 64MB array is stored in a single malloc'ed area. This walk across the 64MB took some 20 seconds, while the same operation on my Windows desktop takes far less than any time I could measure on my watch. My theory was that it was spending all of its time in the alignment trap handler, but I didn't have enough knowledge to dig into the details. The test case is demonstrated by the following commands: $ BIN/vax MicroVAX 3900 simulator V4.0-0 Beta sim> set cpu 64m sim> save somefile The save operation writes the current simulator state to a file. It sounds to me like you need a fast SPARC, or access to one. I can give you an account on dev.neurotica.com, which is an UltraSPARC-T1-based machine running Solaris 10 with Sun's C compiler installed. Several people are using it for free software projects; that's its purpose in life. Let me know if you're interested. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA