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