QBone: Unix V6 and VMS

[Joerg Hoppe]

Hi all,

Two issues solved.

- The QBone "Unixv6.rl02" crashed on the classic 11/23 (M8186 CPU).
Thanks to Joan for pointing on this.

Two things went wrong:
1. you must boot with LTC clock *disabled* and switch ON later when commanded:

    !unix
    unix v6 11/23
    mem = 100 KW max = 63
    start LTC
    #
    
    Apparently the UNIBUS-based code of UV6 does not know that QBUS EVNT is non-maskable,  so the user has to jump in by toggeling the AUX ON/OFF panel switch.
    
2. On M8186 without additional FPP microcode chip there was a trap after boot, because the "Shoppa" V6 was compiled with floating point support. I made a new build without FPP, "!unix" runs fine now. "!unix-fpp" is the old kernel.
    Do "./update-files.sh" or pick the image and *.cmd from
    http://files.retrocmp.com/qunibone/10.03_app_demo/5_applications_q/unixv6.rl02/
    
- VMS on microVAX: We're working on this MSCP problem.
  As part of debugging effort, Ulli "vaxorcist" squeezed a reduced VMS4.4 onto RL02 disk, and it runs fine.

  So we have VMS on QBone (somehow), and QBone passed another test: it can run VMS (sometimes).
  Thanks to Josh and Ulli!
  Do "./update-files.sh" or pick from
  http://files.retrocmp.com/qunibone/10.03_app_demo/5_applications/vms44_uvax.rl02/

 

kind regards,

Joerg

[Joan Touzet]

A bit of thread necromancy here...

The MSCP issue for VMS on VAX has been fixed - Joerg, here's the patch. Josh Dersch and I worked on this together.

https://github.com/j-hoppe/QUniBone/pull/9

While I didn't test 4.4, I can confirm that 5.5 would not boot (and crashed) prior to this patch in the same way.

Newer VMS (such as 7.x) doesn't seem to care about this metadata, but older VMS expects drive geometries to be "real", so now we provide them as requested.

-Joan @ DECromancer