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that sounds like something that there is literally nobody smart enough to use correctly
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Mar 4, 2022 15:59
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Sweevo posted:is old (80s?) VAX hardware worth anything these days? If you did I'd be real interested in getting my hands on one of the microvax.
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Mar 4, 2022 16:46
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Disappointing Dollhouse posted:If you did I'd be real interested in getting my hands on one of the microvax. Sweevo posted:I passed on getting the haul of free VAX stuff. It would have been fun to play with it all but the guy was being shady about exactly what was included. Eventually he let slip that he'd already had people come and pick through the pile, so I figure all the good stuff was gone and he wanted me to drive 90 minutes each way for a van full of 10mb coax ethernet crap and broken printers. i was 50/50 on it for a while, but the guy kept editing things out of the forum post and removing photos, and it turned out he'd been quietly selling off the better items and was trying to con someone into taking away his garbage
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Mar 4, 2022 17:09
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the VAX is here! I haven't unpacked it yet but I'm currently grabbing some ISO images to shove into SCSI2SD, starting with something I'm more familiar with (NetBSD) then getting used to the machine a bit and installing VMS. I've assigned four SCSI LUNs on the SD card: - ID 0: CD-ROM - ID 1: hard disk for NetBSD (or maybe Ultrix if I feel spicy) - ID 2: hard disk for VMS - ID 3: hard disk for possible future hobby project NetBSD/vax is an active port, so the latest release is from May 2021. the last version of VMS that supported VAX was 7.3, which came out in 2001 (and still had support all the way through 2012). it's kind of weird that on a machine this old you can run an operating system that's still under active development and that isn't a hobby project. it almost feels like cheating... so naturally I'll be using this as an excuse to learn VAX assembly and architecture in more detail and will be writing an operating system for it for fun at some point 
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Mar 11, 2022 10:53
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sb hermit posted:Thanks for the explanation of the evolution of the x86 memory model. It really explains all those compile switches in early Linux kernels. ACPI seems like a real shitshow. I've done embedded powerpc development so I always wondered if the i/o address space for x86 is still in use, since it seemed so clunky. I'm sorta happy that it was just an ISA thing. It was in use for a long time for graphics card stuff, because VGA is defined in terms of it. Hence why Linux graphics drivers had to do the iopl() thing (yes, I might have written a couple back in the day) as recently as early PCI or even I think AGP days because that was still part of the mode switching process for most hardware, even for better modes than SVGA. And if you didnt have a specific driver for your card, well, that's all you had to work with in that case hope you enjoy 800x640 resolution.
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Mar 11, 2022 13:42
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eschaton posted:business software written in COBOL may have fared better, I know FORTRAN code did; my rx2660 with DEC FORTRAN running some numeric benchmarks did really impressively for the era in which it was made, on par with some much newer x86-64 hardware About the only thing it had going for it was some pretty impressive floating point performance for its time, yeah. I think it was used in some of the top supercomputers for a bit. Shame if you're using it for anything that isn't that, though.
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Mar 11, 2022 13:46
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feedmegin posted:It was in use for a long time for graphics card stuff, because VGA is defined in terms of it. Hence why Linux graphics drivers had to do the iopl() thing (yes, I might have written a couple back in the day) as recently as early PCI or even I think AGP days because that was still part of the mode switching process for most hardware, even for better modes than SVGA. And if you didnt have a specific driver for your card, well, that's all you had to work with in that case hope you enjoy 800x640 resolution. the fact that every graphics card can still emulate the VGA/CRTC I/O interface in 2022 is painful at one point AMD was really good about implementing native resolutions in VBE but I don't know if that's the case still. I remember my R9 290 returned a 1440p resolution in VBE so you could get a driver-agnostic but completely unaccelerated framebuffer if you really needed one. not sure about nvidia, and intel it was pretty irrelevant for because every one of their GPUs still implements the modesetting procedure of the i915 so you can pretty easily tell it to do whatever you want and worst case it'll tell you to pound sand e: a basic modesetting driver for i915 is like, 150 lines of code, with no need to do any sort of v86 or real mode calls to VBE to make it work either Kazinsal fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 13:52
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My favorite bit of VESA trivia is that OS/2 would run BIOS routines in VM86 mode and record their IO port accesses and then just replay them without bothering to execute the real-mode BIOS.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:35
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Captain Foo posted:that sounds like something that there is literally nobody smart enough to use correctly what actually spurred me to start this thread was re-reading a fun article about someone getting bit by speculative execution triggering what sounds like a "nobody smart enough to use correctly" instruction on the xbox360 CPU, and at the very end of the article mentioning that they had cited that as a nasty problem to debug, and the interviewer immediately coming back with “yeah, we hit something similar on the Alpha processor” https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/finding-a-cpu-design-bug-in-the-xbox-360/ quote:But, the CPU was for a video game console and performance trumped all so a new instruction was added – xdcbt. The normal PowerPC dcbt instruction was a typical prefetch instruction. The xdcbt instruction was an extended prefetch instruction that fetched straight from memory to the L1 d-cache, skipping L2. This meant that memory coherency was no longer guaranteed, but hey, we’re video game programmers, we know what we’re doing, it will be fine.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:16
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oh hey and it looks like that guy recently wrote another article where he dives further into the xbox360 CPU: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/01/12/5-5-mm-in-1-25-nanoseconds/#more-3829
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Mar 11, 2022 23:24
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It wasn't that the instruction was too difficult to use, it was that if that byte sequence appeared anywhere in the program it was possible for the CPU to for-real corrupt memory by speculatively executing it.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:30
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oh, that's right. although even without the speculative execution issue it looks like it was still pretty dangerous to use
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Mar 11, 2022 23:34
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 so I'm still having a few issues with the SCSI controller (something about it doesn't like autobooting from the SCSI2SD but it'll let me manually boot off it) but the VAX works! login is a bit slow because it turns out a circa 1990 microvax isn't exactly that fast at doing 256 rounds of blowfish. also it can't handle SSH so I need to build some kind of SSH-to-telnet bridge (maybe automate it somewhat using krb5 telnet authentication? idk). also it's not keeping the time right, but I think that's my fault since the RTC chip/soldered on battery combo is brand new full boot log for turbonerds: pre:>> NetBSD/vax boot [1.11 Sat Nov 6 19:40:01 UTC 2010] <<
>> Press any key to abort autoboot 0
nfs_open: must mount first.
open netbsd.vax: Device not configured
> boot netbsd
2403628+308444 [194288+184371]=0x2f2c58
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
NetBSD 5.1 (GENERIC) #0: Sat Nov 6 19:48:36 UTC 2010
builds@b8.netbsd.org:/home/builds/ab/netbsd-5-1-RELEASE/vax/201011061943Z-obj/home/builds/ab/netbsd-5-1-RELEASE/src/sys/arch/vax/compile/GENERIC
MicroVAX 3100/m{30,40}
total memory = 32508 KB
avail memory = 28216 KB
mainbus0 (root)
cpu0 at mainbus0: KA48, SOC, 6KB L1 cache
vsbus0 at mainbus0
vsbus0: 32K entry DMA SGMAP at PA 0x440000 (VA 0x80440000)
vsbus0: interrupt mask 0
le0 at vsbus0 csr 0x200e0000 vec 770 ipl 17 maskbit 1 buf 0x0-0xffff
le0: address 08:00:2b:3a:15:90
le0: 32 receive buffers, 8 transmit buffers
dz0 at vsbus0 csr 0x200a0000 vec 124 ipl 17 maskbit 4
dz0: 4 lines
lkms0 at dz0
wsmouse0 at lkms0 mux 0
asc0 at vsbus0 csr 0x200c0080 vec 774 ipl 17 maskbit 0
asc0: NCR53C94, 25MHz, SCSI ID 6
scsibus0 at asc0: 8 targets, 8 luns per target
scsibus0: waiting 2 seconds for devices to settle...
sd0 at scsibus0 target 0 lun 0: <DEC, RRD40, 1> disk fixed
sd0: 2048 MB, 261 cyl, 255 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 4194304 sectors
sd0: async, 8-bit transfers
sd1 at scsibus0 target 1 lun 0: <DEC, RZ35, 0016> disk fixed
sd1: 2048 MB, 261 cyl, 255 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 4194304 sectors
sd1: async, 8-bit transfers
sd2 at scsibus0 target 2 lun 0: <DEC, RZ35, 0016> disk fixed
sd2: 2048 MB, 261 cyl, 255 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 4194304 sectors
sd2: async, 8-bit transfers
sd3 at scsibus0 target 3 lun 0: <DEC, RZ35, 0016> disk fixed
sd3: 2048 MB, 261 cyl, 255 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 4194304 sectors
sd3: async, 8-bit transfers
Kernelized RAIDframe activated
label: 0
sd0: no disk label
label: 0
sd1: no disk label
label: 0
sd3: no disk label
boot device: sd2
root on sd2a dumps on sd2b
root file system type: ffs
WARNING: clock gained 2 days
WARNING: CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
Tue Nov 9 07:30:57 PST 2010
swapctl: setting dump device to /dev/sd2b
swapctl: adding /dev/sd2b as swap device at priority 0
Starting file system checks:
/dev/rsd2a: file system is clean; not checking
Setting tty flags.
Setting sysctl variables:
kern.no_sa_support: 0 -> 1
ddb.onpanic: 1 -> 0
Starting network.
Hostname: ashe.redacted
IPv6 mode: host
Configuring network interfaces:.
Adding interface aliases:.
Starting dhcpcd.
Building databases: dev, utmp, utmpx done
Starting syslogd.
Checking for core dump...
savecore: no core dump
Mounting all filesystems...
Clearing temporary files.
Creating a.out runtime link editor directory cache.
Checking quotas: done.
Setting securelevel: kern.securelevel: 0 -> 1
swapctl: setting dump device to /dev/sd2b
Starting virecover.
Starting local daemons:.
Updating motd.
postfix/postfix-script: starting the Postfix mail system
Starting inetd.
Starting cron.
Tue Nov 9 07:33:39 PST 2010
NetBSD/vax (ashe.redacted) (console)
login:
Kazinsal fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 01:17
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you may have accidentally doxxed yourself with that host name
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Mar 15, 2022 01:27
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The ROM may not know about RZ35 and be hesitant to boot from it automatically but trust the operator. You could reconfigure your SCSI2SD to have all the disks start at the same blocks as now, but have the one you boot from claim to be an RZ26 (sized to match, of course) and it should Just Work.
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Mar 15, 2022 01:28
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infernal machines posted:you may have accidentally doxxed yourself with that host name  eschaton posted:The ROM may not know about RZ35 and be hesitant to boot from it automatically but trust the operator. You could reconfigure your SCSI2SD to have all the disks start at the same blocks as now, but have the one you boot from claim to be an RZ26 (sized to match, of course) and it should Just Work. it’s something on the SCSI2SD’s controller about how it handles async transfers. happens even with zero devices being emulated so I think it’s something that the ROM is expecting to work a certain way but the SCSI2SD is handling completely differently. I need to find the right esoteric DEC field service manual for this thing basically
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Mar 15, 2022 01:40
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bitsavers is your lord and savior
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Mar 15, 2022 01:51
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i feel like that microvax ought to be the next yosbbs host
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Mar 15, 2022 07:50
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fast emulated VAX running VMS NOTES and MONSTER (the MUD ancestor) with SA-account-derived auth via LDAP or something, and no user directories so users can only really put stuff in the shared notesfiles and join MONSTER
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Mar 16, 2022 08:02
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want to give InterLisp-D a try on an emulated Xerox workstation? set up an account online.interlisp.org and you even get a persistent workspace the square-dance crew who used to come into the bar & grill across the street from my place, pre-COVID, used to include the last owners of Medley I asked after them with one of the folks from the crew not too long before the pandemic, because I was hoping to acquire the InterLisp IP and release it; my understanding had been the person who owned it was a bit of an rear end, but eventually disposition fell on a relative who didn’t have their head up their rear end and who worked with a number of people to enable this to happen it’s pretty awesome, and mostly a faithful representation of what it’s like to use on real hardware—any misrepresentation is in the near-instantaneous performance, compared to a 16-bit bitslice microcoded CPU whose architecture was derived from the Nova, or the slightly more abstract virtual machine built atop of it incidentally, the emulation they’re using should also be able to run the Smalltalk and ViewPoint environments, I hope those can also be hosted and shared; Smalltalk in particular is such an amazing system to use, everything is right there and malleable like putty, even moreso on a Lisp Machine
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Mar 16, 2022 10:13
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eschaton posted:want to give InterLisp-D a try on an emulated Xerox workstation?  this is insanely cool
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Mar 20, 2022 20:52
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eschaton posted:want to give InterLisp-D a try on an emulated Xerox workstation? holy hell
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