[HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?

I would suspect that the VM in reality is also accessing the network through the TAP interface in the end, so technology wise it ends up the same way, it's just a question how much of a middle layer you'll have. Running simh directly on Linux, or have a VirtualBox on Linux, on which you run simh. Johnny On 2012-06-04 13:25, Brian Hechinger wrote: Wouldn't it be easier (and more efficient) to use TAP interfaces? That's what I'm going to do as soon as I have time. (Well, Crossbow on Solaris instead of TAP but same idea) -brian On Jun 4, 2012, at 5:37, Sampsa Laine<sampsa at mac.com> wrote: I configured a Linux box to automatically fire up VirtualBox from rc.local, and then run a stripped down Linux instance in the VM to run SIMH-VAX. Point being that I could then access the network interface of the SIMH-VAX from the host running VirtualBox :) The host also ran decnet-linux.. It was quite nifty, but too heavy-weight for a Pi.. Sampsa On 4 Jun 2012, at 03:06, Boyanich, Alastair wrote: Hi Rob, There may be a super easy way. Try the /etc/rc.local script file. You can think of it in old MS-DOS/Amiga terms as the AUTOEXEC.BAT or S:user-startup files. This script usually gets run after the system has entered muti-user mode and after the networking is up and running. Have a go running your simh VAX executable from there :) You can also get fancy with GNU Screen so that it saves and disconnects the console so you can connect to it after an auto-startup. Regards, Al Boyanich -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Rob Jarratt Sent: Monday, 4 June 2012 9:45 AM To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: RE: [HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX? 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.