[HECnet] Area 9 is (slowly) coming back online

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Monday, March 11, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:10 PM, Brian Hechinger <wonko at 4amlunch.net> wrote:
I've been battling idle on Solaris for a whole now. Haven't figured it out yet
though.

-brian

On Mar 11, 2013, at 20:26, "b4" <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:


Hello all,

I have been in the middle of moving things around and I've got my area
router back up and I have the proper things forwarded now. ;) Everything
should come back up completely before too long.

One major caveat: SIMH in Solaris 10 zones...am I doing something
wrong or is SET CPU IDLE disallowed in this scenario?   If so, it
looks like i'll throttle the execution rate as well as running the
VMs on 10BASE-T ports. ;)

Idling for any simulator requires that the host system's clock tick be <= the size of the simulated system's clock tick.   VAX systems have a clock tick of 10ms.   Idling for simulated VAX systems works best if the host clock tick is 1ms.

Windows systems have a user mode programmatically settable clock tick size (a facility useful for some media playback capabilities).   On Windows systems simh will set the host's clock tick to 1ms while a simulator is running.   

We haven't seen programmatically settable host clock tick sizes on other platforms.   In general, other platforms have a tick size which can be changed in some system specific way   (which might require building a kernel with a desired tick size) or not changeable at all.     This issue comes up often enough that adding how to make these system specific adjustments would be a useful addition to the simh FAQ.   Any feedback on this subject will be welcome.

Recent simh code will display what it has determined to be the host's clock size if simh believes the host's clock tick is too small to support idling when you attempt to enable idling. 

Recent simh code can always display host system's tick size with the 'EXAMINE TIMER OS_SLEEP_MIN_MS' command.

The latest simh code is available from https://github.com/simh/simh/archive/master.zip.

Gregg Levine wrote:
Idle on some items that are not Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD may not work
because of how they interpret the timer. Same goes for trying to get the idle
function to work on Windows.

I haven't heard from anyone who's had issues getting idling to work on Windows.   If you know of such a case, I would be interested to explore what may be happening in this case.

Thanks.

- Mark Pizzolato