Programming DEQNAs and DELQAs on the bare metal

Lee Gleason

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Apr 3, 2021, 10:20:46 PM4/3/21

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As a hobby project, I'm experimenting with programming MicroVAXes on
the bare metal - no OS.

I'd like to be able to communicate via DEQNA or DELQA while doing
this. The manuals for both of these cards are a trifle...recondite (the
DELQA manual is better than the DEQNA manual, but it's still no
pushover). I've puzzled out how to make them cough up their boot rom
code, but nothing else so far.

Does anyone have any examples of doing card Setup, and packet Send and
Receive for either of these two cards, sans OS (on PDP11s or
MicroVAXes)? Failing examples, any tips for getting them to go that the
manuals gloss over?

--
Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR
Control-G Consultants
lee.g...@comcast.net

Ian Hammond

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Apr 4, 2021, 4:14:33 AM4/4/21

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I could never get the ethernet cards to work per the information
in the manuals (which wasn't all that unusual back in the 1980s).
Instead I found my own solutions via experimentation (aka hacking).
That said, these days I find it equally difficult to comprehend
my own ethernet code, however, for what its worth I've copied
some potentially useful sources to:

https://github.com/rust11/rust/tree/master/kit/ether

NP.MAC - Bootstrap MOP Setup/Send/Receive
NP.MAC is a skeleton RT-11 driver with an ethernet MOP bootstrap.
The trick here was to fit an ethernet boot into the less-than-256
words available for boots.

EG.MAC - DEQNA Setup/Send/Receive driver
Buried beneath all the conditionals is an interrupt-driven RT-11
driver that slots into the NP.MAC skeleton driver.

EQ.MAC - Conditionals
LDE.MAC - Structure definitions
Definitions for some of the structures used in EG.MAC and NP.MAC.
LDE is a source file extract from a generic macro library found
at RUST\P\SMS\.

NF.R
This is the Windows end of the NP.MAC MOP boot. I couldn't find
the documentation for this back in the 1980's. NF.R is written
in my own language, Rider/C, however it has only one degree of
separation from plain C (including DECUS C). The source has
debug code because WinPCap stopped working for me at some point.

QNB.MAC
This was my small app to read and store the DEQNA boot.

\EVS\*.MAR
Apropos nothing-in-particular here are the sources from a vastly
incomplete VAX project from many years ago which might have this
or that of interest. There's a debugger and reverse assembler of
sorts (BUG.MAR, REV.MAR). The definition files are located in
RUST\P\SMS\ED%.MAR.

Lee Gleason

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Apr 4, 2021, 3:44:11 PM4/4/21

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On 4/4/2021 3:14 AM, Ian Hammond wrote:
> On Sunday, April 4, 2021 at 12:20:46 PM UTC+10, lee.g...@gmail.com wrote:
>> As a hobby project, I'm experimenting with programming MicroVAXes on
>> the bare metal - no OS.
>>
>> I'd like to be able to communicate via DEQNA or DELQA while doing
>> this. The manuals for both of these cards are a trifle...recondite (the
>> DELQA manual is better than the DEQNA manual, but it's still no
>> pushover). I've puzzled out how to make them cough up their boot rom
>> code, but nothing else so far.
>>
>> Does anyone have any examples of doing card Setup, and packet Send and
>> Receive for either of these two cards, sans OS (on PDP11s or
>> MicroVAXes)? Failing examples, any tips for getting them to go that the
>> manuals gloss over?
>>
>> --
>> Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR
>> Control-G Consultants
>> lee.g...@comcast.net
>
>
> I could never get the ethernet cards to work per the information
> in the manuals (which wasn't all that unusual back in the 1980s).
> Instead I found my own solutions via experimentation (aka hacking).
> That said, these days I find it equally difficult to comprehend
> my own ethernet code, however, for what its worth I've copied
> some potentially useful sources to:
>
> https://github.com/rust11/rust/tree/master/kit/ether
>
>

Thanks for the info! These are great examples.

Three Jeeps

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Apr 5, 2021, 2:37:39 PM4/5/21

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I don't have any personal examples. As a suggestion - depending on the depth of your Linux/Unix chops, you may want to look at Net BSD sources or Unix BSD V7 sources to see how they deal with a DELQA or DEQNA on a microVAX.
Good luck.
J

Bob Eager

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Apr 6, 2021, 4:21:16 AM4/6/21

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On Mon, 05 Apr 2021 11:37:38 -0700, Three Jeeps wrote:

> I don't have any personal examples. As a suggestion - depending on the
> depth of your Linux/Unix chops, you may want to look at Net BSD sources
> or Unix BSD V7 sources to see how they deal with a DELQA or DEQNA on a
> microVAX.

I think V7 is PDP-11. But that would do.

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

Andy Valencia

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Apr 6, 2021, 5:49:39 PM4/6/21

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Bob Eager <news...@eager.cx> writes:
> > I don't have any personal examples. As a suggestion - depending on the
> > depth of your Linux/Unix chops, you may want to look at Net BSD sources
> > or Unix BSD V7 sources to see how they deal with a DELQA or DEQNA on a
> > microVAX.

> I think V7 is PDP-11. But that would do.

FWIW, I just looked at 2.11BSD, and the if_qe.c driver appears to be
for a DEQNA. Under /usr/src/sys/vaxif.

Andy Valencia
Home page: https://www.vsta.org/andy/
To contact me: https://www.vsta.org/contact/andy.html