PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sun Jan 20 15:29:09 CST 2019


    > From: Paul Koning

    > It checks if the bits 007750 are active in the parity CSR, if so it
    > takes that to be an address/ECC parity CSR.

That's odd; those are the 'error address' bits. Maybe there's an assumption
that the sweep of memory to size it will have caused a parity error from
garbage in DRAM at startup? (If so, I wonder if it would work on a machine
with all core? :-)

    > It figures out the CSR to memory association by going through memory in
    > 1 kW increments ... This should set bad parity, and it scans all the
    > CSRs to see which one reports an error ... If no CSR has that set, it
    > concludes the particular block is no-parity memory.

Oooh, pretty clever - good workaround for rhe undefined relationship between
CSR's and memory.

If I added parity support to V6, I'd be tempted to do it with a
hand-configured table - devices are all manually configured anyway in V6, so
I'd be continuing a theme... :-)

	Noel


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