Idle handling depends on the guest OS doing what SIMH expects. On some emulated machine
types, like the PDP11, the answer is usually easy because there is a WAIT instruction that
is widely used. The VAX doesn't have any such thing, and as a result SIMH tries to
recognize the idle loop. That tends to be a messy heuristic, and it is vulnerable to
breakage. For example, SIMH VAX knows about NetBSD, but that heuristic only works in old
NetBSD releases, not in the current one. (I've been trying to figure out a good
answer for the current one; there may not be other than getting some help from NetBSD by
inserting a magic instruction that SIMH can look for.)
paul
On Sep 19, 2012, at 9:07 AM, Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Sep 16, 2012, at 14:23, Peter Coghlan <HECNET at beyondthepale.ie> wrote:
Perhaps there is a host platform specific problem with set cpu idle?
That's the conclusion I've come to as it works fine most places. Something about
Solaris trips it up but I haven't been able to figure out what yet.
I would also like to run multible instances of simh. This works fine for me as
long as only one of them tries to do networking. Once I attempt to start
networking on a second instance, the networking on the first instance stops
working. This makes it difficult to run a vaxcluster on my alpha :-(
How are the simh instances sharing the Ethernet interface?
-brian