[HECnet] Trying to build SIMH from git (on OpenIndiana)

[Brian Hechinger]

On 3/15/2013 7:35 PM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm wrote:
On Friday, March 15, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Brian Hechinger wrote:
On 3/15/2013 7:00 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yes! Now to get the NICs working so I can test simh entirely.;)
What do you need NICs for simh? What are you running?
Historically, if you want your host system to be able to communicate with the guest simh system on most *nix platforms, the simplest way to get that working is to dedicate a NIC to the simh instance and connect it to the same LAN as your host system.

Alternative approaches which were always more complex and not available on all *nix platforms involved the use of tap devices and internal bridging configured on the host system.   Doing this has completely different recipes on each platform and possibly on different versions of the same platform.   With versions of simh 3.9 and beyond, Windows system can simply share the host systems NIC and also communicate directly with it.   Some *nix platforms have support for libvdeplug.   These platforms can also be configured to avoid the addition of a dedicated NIC for the simh instance.   The 0readme_ethernet.txt file in the simh source distribution describes the known ways which have been used to address this issue on various platforms.


I ask because Solaris 11 (and the Illumos based stuff like OpenIndiana) have support for the new CrossBow network virtualization.

You create "vnics" and they all share a physical nic in just the way simh needs. It's what I'll be doing.

For example, on my machine I'll be doing the following (once I get rebooted and IDLE works):

dladm create-vnic -l bge1 -v 152 simh1
dladm create-vnic -l bge1 -v 152 simh2

That will create two nics named simh1 and simh2 that simh can use. They will both use and share the physical interface bge1 along with some other stuff. The -v is the VLAN ID. In my setup this interface is a VLAN trunk into the switch and VLAN 152 is my DECnet VLAN.

-brian