Added Message Suppression flag for status values, including providing a -Q option to the RETURN command to return with a message suppressed status
Added Do command file default extension of .sim (from Dave Bryan)
Added -O option to DO command file invocation which causes the caller's ON state and actions to be inherited in the newly called DO command file
Added Command Line expansion to include a %* which expands to the whole set of arguments (%1 ... %9)
Relaxed Command Line argument substitution (delimited by %'s) which cause environment variable lookups to first lookup the literal name provided and if that fails, lookup the name upcased.
Added a SIM_VERIFY special Command Line expansion variable which expands to "-V" when command echoing is active
Added a SIM_MESSAGE special Command Line expansion variable which expands to "-Q" when error message display is suppressed
Added Command Aliasing, which causes the initial token on a command line to be looked up in the environment variable table, and if it exists to substitute the expansion for the initial token.
Changed environment variable defining (with SET ENV variable=value) to always upcase the variable name.
Added SHIFT command which shifts the numbered argument variables %1 ... %9 to the left by one (%1 becomes what was %2, etc.)
Added CALL command which will call a routine (label) in the currently executing command file
Added SET VERIFY and SET NOVERIFY commands which enable or disable DO command echoing
Added SET MESSAGE and SET NOMESSAGE commands which globally enable or disable the display of status messages when commands (or Do Commands) return with unsuccessful status
Added SET ON INHERIT and SET ON NOINHERIT to globally enable inheritance of ON state and actions when DO commands are invoked
Added PROCEED and IGNORE commands which are do nothing but return success. These can be used in specific ON actions to possibly ignore particular return status values
Added DO command file line number to error messages which are displayed while processing DO command files
Expanded the DO command nesting level to 20 to potentially allow for more nesting due to the extensive use of CALL commands are used
- Removed flawed logic which assumed that sim_interval was meaningful when referenced by an asynchronous thread.
- Adjust the event_time of events removed from the asynch queue to account for the average time spent on the queue before the event was noticed by the instruction execution thread.
- Added a sim_activate_notbefore function which specifies an rtime which is the earliest time the event should fire.
- Changed the 'wakeup from idle' logic to force an immediate asynch queue check if the wakeup was not due to a timeout (i.e. it was due to an asynch queue insertion).
- Fixed the descrip.mms to build asynchronous support on AXP and IA64 VMS with kernel threads enabled
Added %SIM_VERIFY% name expansion as "-V" or "" depending on the current do command echo state
Added recording of last command failure status for interactive entered commands
The logic here is based on the idea that a restore image contains the memory content for a running simulator, while the attached files contain the disk contents for that simulator. If the disk contents have changed since the memory image was created then the two data sets are likely out of sync and disk details cached in memory (i.e. file system information, storage allocation, etc.) will likely result in corrupted disk structures if they are used.
The default behavior is to fail the restore operation if these inconsistencies are noticed. This sanity check can be overridden if the restore command is invoked with the '-F' switch: sim> restore -F simulator-state.file
Also added logging of all erro messages produced during a restore operation to both stdout and a simulator log file if it is being used.
- Sleep for the observed clock tick size while throttling
- Recompute the throttling wait once every 10 seconds
to account for varying instruction mixes during
different phases of a simulator execution or to
accommodate the presence of other load on the host
system.
- Each of the pre-existing throttling modes (Kcps,
Mcps, and %) all compute the appropriate throttling
interval dynamically. These dynamic computations
assume that 100% of the host CPU is dedicated to
the current simulator during this computation.
This assumption may not always be true and under
certain conditions may never provide a way to
correctly determine the appropriate throttling
wait. An additional throttling mode has been added
which allows the simulator operator to explicitly
state the desired throttling wait parameters.
These are specified by:
SET THROT insts/delay
where 'insts' is the number of instructions to
execute before sleeping for 'delay' milliseconds.
Note: Since NetBSD and OpenBSD are still actively developed operating systems, new versions of
these OSes are moving targets with regard to providing idle detection. At this time, recent versions
of OpenBSD have veered from the traditional OS idle approach taken in the other BSD derived OSes.
Determining a reasonable idle detection pattern does not seem possible for these versions.
I’ve always wanted to have the option to have simulated devices behave
more naturally with respect to I/O operations. By more naturally I
mean that the current simulator model I/O is either polled (for asynchronous
things link Muxes and Network), or it is performed in the middle of some
instruction execution taking possibly many milliseconds (disk and/or tapes).
The existing model creates quite deterministic behavior which helps to debug
and understand issues, but it trades off potential instruction execution
while performing these I/O operations in between instruction execution.
To address this concept (while still retaining the potential advantages of
the original model), I’ve designed an Asynch I/O model extension for simh.
In order to flesh-out and debug this design, I’ve also refactored several
devices to utilize this capability. Please read the attached
0readmeAsynchIO.txt file for concept details about the approach.
In order to make disk devices easy to implement (within or without the
AsynchIO framework), I’ve created a sim_disk.c library which is modeled
on the sim_tape.c library to generalize disk I/O like tape I/O is
generalized in sim_tape.c. This sim_disk.c library now provides that
natural place to implement support for various disk implementation formats
(just like sim_tape support several formats, and one day will be the place
to add direct physical tape access). The current sim_disk library provides
the framework for direct support of 3 different disk formats:
1) standard simh disk format
2) platform specific physical disk access
and 3) platform independent Virtual Disk format.
The Virtual Disk format is an implementation of the format described in
the ”Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Image Format Specification”. The
VHD specification is available for anyone to implement under the "Microsoft
Open Specification Promise" described at
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx.
The VHD implementation includes support for:
1) Fixed sized disks
2) Dynamically expanding disks
and 3) Differencing Disks.
Dynamically expanding disks don’t change their “Virtual Size”, but they
don’t consume disk space on the containing storage until the virtual
sectors in the disk are actually written to (i.e. an RA81 or RA92 VHD
with a VMS installed on it may initially only contain 30+ MB of files,
and the resulting VHD will be 30+ MB). The VHD format contains meta data
which describes the virtual device. Amongst this meta data is the simh
device type which the VHD was originally created as. This metadata is
therefore available whenever that VHD is attached to an emulated disk
device in the future so the device type & size can be automatically be
configured.
Sim_disk_attach is used by device emulations to attach a simh/vhd/raw
device to a simulated device. The following simh command switches
are used by the sim_disk_attach API:
-R Attach Read Only.
-E Must Exist (if not specified an attempt to create the
indicated virtual disk will be attempted).
-F Open the indicated disk container in a specific format
(default is to autodetect VHD defaulting to simh if the
indicated container is not a VHD).
-X When creating a VHD, create a fixed sized VHD (vs a
Dynamically expanding one).
-C Create a VHD and copy its contents from another disk
(simh, VHD, or RAW format).
-D Create a Differencing VHD (relative to an already
existing VHD disk)
Examples:
sim> show rq
RQ, address=20001468-2000146B*, no vector, 4 units
RQ0, 159MB, not attached, write enabled, RD54, autosize, SIMH format
RQ1, 159MB, not attached, write enabled, RD54, autosize, SIMH format
RQ2, 159MB, not attached, write enabled, RD54, autosize, SIMH format
RQ3, 409KB, not attached, write enabled, RX50, autosize, SIMH format
sim> atta rq0 RA81.vhd
sim> show rq0
RQ0, 456MB, attached to RA81.vhd, write enabled, RA81, autosize, VHD format
sim> set rq2 ra92
sim> att rq2 -f vhd RA92.vhd
RQ2: creating new file
sim> sho rq2
RQ2, 1505MB, attached to RA92.vhd, write enabled, RA92, autosize, VHD format
sim> ! dir RA92.vhd
Volume in drive H is New Volume
Volume Serial Number is F8DE-510C
Directory of H:\Data
04/14/2011 12:57 PM 5,120 RA92.vhd
1 File(s) 5,120 bytes
0 Dir(s) 3,074,412,544 bytes free
sim> atta rq3 -c RA92-1.vhd RA92.vhd
sim> atta rq3 -c RA92-1.vhd RA92.vhd
RQ3: creating new virtual disk 'RA92-1.vhd'
RQ3: Copied 1505MB. 99% complete.
RQ3: Copied 1505MB. Done.
sim> sh rq3
RQ3, 1505MB, attached to RA92-1.vhd, write enabled, RA92, autosize, VHD format
sim> ! dir RA92*
Volume in drive H is New Volume
Volume Serial Number is F8DE-510C
Directory of H:\Data
04/14/2011 01:12 PM 5,120 RA92-1.vhd
04/14/2011 12:58 PM 5,120 RA92.vhd
2 File(s) 10,240 bytes
0 Dir(s) 3,074,404,352 bytes free
sim> sho rq2
RQ2, 1505MB, not attached, write enabled, RA92, autosize, VHD format
sim> set rq2 ra81
sim> set rq2 noauto
sim> sho rq2
RQ2, 456MB, not attached, write enabled, RA81, noautosize, VHD format
sim> set rq2 format=simh
sim> sho rq2
RQ2, 456MB, not attached, write enabled, RA81, noautosize, SIMH format
sim> atta rq2 -c RA81-Copy.vhd VMS055.dsk
RQ2: creating new virtual disk 'RA81-Copy.vhd'
RQ2: Copied 456MB. 99% complete.
RQ2: Copied 456MB. Done.
sim> sho rq2
RQ2, 456MB, attached to RA81-Copy.vhd, write enabled, RA81, noautosize, VHD format
sim> det rq2
sim> ! dir RA81-Copy.vhd
Volume in drive H is New Volume
Volume Serial Number is F8DE-510C
Directory of H:\Data
04/14/2011 01:22 PM 178,304,512 RA81-Copy.vhd
1 File(s) 178,304,512 bytes
0 Dir(s) 2,896,097,280 bytes free
sim> ! dir VMS055.dsk
Volume in drive H is New Volume
Volume Serial Number is F8DE-510C
Directory of H:\Data
03/08/2011 01:42 PM 403,663,872 VMS055.dsk
1 File(s) 403,663,872 bytes
0 Dir(s) 2,896,097,280 bytes free
sim>
