Update: QBone Ethernet emulation: early successes

[Joan Touzet]

Hello everyone,

Earlier this year we made an announcement that Ethernet emulation support was coming to the QBone this summer.

On Friday, the first ARP and ICMP packets made their way from 2.11BSD (on a real PDP-11/73) to Linux running on the QBone itself, and vice-versa..

Today, full TCP/IP traffic (telnet, traceoute, etc.) was established between the PDP-11/73 running 2.11BSD at our lab and co-located machines at our downtown Toronto datacentre, 6 or 7 hops away. How exciting!

The code needs a bit of work still, as there are a few crashes and hangs still present.  Hopefully, we can get a beta out in the next couple of weeks for adventurous users, though we may miss the equinox. Sorry about that.

The first beta is not expected to work with DECnet (no device-level MOP functionality is present in the emulation), but at least TCP/IP should work. Some changes are also required to the base Linux setup on the QBone to enable the bridging setup; early testers will need to make changes beyond running the usual update scripts.

More information will be coming soon. Thanks in advance for your patience!

-Joan @ DECromancer

[John H. Reinhardt]

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Looking forward to this!

I hope getting DECnet working won't be too hard.  Having both TCP/IP and DECnet would be terrific!

Thanks for the update!

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John H. Reinhardt

[Joan Touzet]

On Sunday, September 14, 2025 at 11:25:23 p.m. UTC-4 John Reinhardt wrote:

Looking forward to this!

I hope getting DECnet working won't be too hard.  Having both TCP/IP and DECnet would be terrific!

DECnet is absolutely planned, don't worry. Development won't be out of beta until it works.

[Mark Matlock]

Joan,

    Congratulations on the progress of a QBone Ethernet emulation!!

    I would be happy to help beta test when you are ready to do that.

    I had one question about DECnet implementation that goes back to the original BlinkenBone on BeagleBone white units with simh. My understanding at that time was that the BeagleBone’s Ethernet chip did not support “promiscuous” Ethernet and DECnet required that. With your built in BeagleBone I assume that is no longer a problem?

Thanks for everything!

Mark

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 15, 2025, at 3:11 AM, Joan Touzet <decroma...@gmail.com> wrote:



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