TOPS-10 boots, OPSER starts CDRSTK and that goes into an infinite loop.

[Ric Werme]

This post is a bit premature, I should look into things a bit more, but it ties into my post about the console display when the system is idle.

On OPSER:

!:what all
M2      4       1,2                     ^C      00:00:00
M1      3       1,2                     ^C      00:00:00
C       5       1,2             CDRSTK  RN      00:01:01
B       6       1,2             BATCON  HB      00:00:00
L       7       1,2             LPTSPL  HB      00:00:00
PT      8       1,2             PTPSPL  HB      00:00:00
CP      9       1,2             CDPSPL  HB      00:00:00
7       10      1,2                     ^C      00:00:00
!:kill c

CDRSTK seems to be a program responsible for reading batch jobs off the card reader and queues them for execution.  Okay, it would be nice if that reads a Linux pipe or file or something, it could be a way to load files on to TOPS-10.  I can write stuff to LPT: and find it in test.log.

At any rate, it goes into a loop and the console looks way too busy. The ":kill c" kills job "c", or 5, which is cdrstk and the system goes idle and the console lights are at PC 1 in the null job, as I expected.  But they changed the null job on me, it's no longer a one instruction AOJA loop!

So, far TOPS-10 is running happily without CDRSTK, not a surprise.

[Ric Werme]

Okay, it appears that CDRSTK goes into an infinite loop trying to open CDR: or CDR000:.  I'm not exactly certain why, as "copy foo=cdr:" works, but yields a zero length file.  Perhaps CDRSTK is in a loop reading zero-length files.  Not work much extra effort.

I see that bin/pdp10-ka is built without CDR support, so the simplest way to deal with this is to simply not start CDRSTK.

When the system starts, it starts OPSER, and that reads SYS:OPR.ATO (SYS: is [1,4]).  There is an identical file in [1,2] and editing the latter had no effect, but copying it to SYS: did.

I recommend deleting or commenting out CDRSTK:

.r filcom

*=sys:opr.ato,dsk:opr.ato
File 1) SYS:OPR.ATO[1,4]        created: 1008 21-APR-1978
File 2) DSKB:OPR.ATO[1,2]       created: 2250 10-SEPT-2025

1)1     :SLOGIN 1/2
1)      :SILENCE
1)      :DEFINE C=
1)      C-R CDRSTK
1)      :REVIVE
1)      C-START
1)      ;    BRING UP BATCON NEXT SO BATCH JOBS CAN GET
****
2)1     ;ejw simh (at least pdp10-ka) has no CDR support and CDRSTK goes into a loop.
2)      ;ejw :SLOGIN 1/2
2)      ;ejw :SILENCE
2)      ;ejw :DEFINE C=
2)      ;ejw C-R CDRSTK
2)      ;ejw :REVIVE
2)      ;ejw C-START
2)      ;    BRING UP BATCON NEXT SO BATCH JOBS CAN GET
**************

%files are different

*^C

.copy sys:opr.ato=dsk:opr.ato