24 May
2023
24 May
'23
8:15 p.m.
On May 19, 2023, at 8:23 PM, Johnny Billquist
<bqt(a)softjar.se> wrote:
There are some test scripts and tools in the RSX DECnet sources, but they are really RSX
specific, and for testing RSX against different types of systems.
I've never used them, and I don't know what would be required for them to even be
usable.
Apart from those, I don't think I've seen anything.
But there is something for RSX, which might be answering parts of your question, but
it's nothing general.
PyDECnet comes with a large body of unit tests.
But apart from that, it does seem the picture is pretty bleak. RSTS (DECnet/E) has two
set of tests; I'm not sure if both are published or some are internal only.
One set is the "exerciser", part of a suite of "xyEXER" programs to
put test loads on various I/O subsystems. For example there are also disk and tape
exercisers. Those were done partly for installation checkout by customers, and may also
help with the final assembly and test process that DEC used for PDP-11 systems. Those
were normally load-tested with RSTS, for those hardware configs that RSTS can run on. The
experience was that RSTS was better at breaking marginal problems than other tests,
certainly better than the diagnostics.
The other test set is the DTS/DTR (or DTSEND/DTRECV) program pair, which can do DECnet
traffic tests with a variety of parameters. In RSTS, flow control is chosen by the
application rather than the DECnet core, and DTS/DTR allow data tests to be run with all
the flow control variants.
paul