PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue Jan 8 13:45:52 CST 2019


    > From: Fritz Mueller

    > Kernel boots on my actual hardware, but an "ls" in single-user mode
    > generates a "Memory error -- core dumped".

Oh, yeah, your hardware definitely has issues, then.

    > So evidence is mounting that I really do have some sort of issue with
    > my MS11-L.

If so, I'm rather suprised that the DEC diagnostics didn't pick it up.

    > Tried a multi-user boot for kicks

You're stu^H^H^Hbrave!

    > I'm actually able to "ls" under that.

Yeah, probably your process wound up at a different place in physical memory
(although there are a zillion other ways one could get that effect, depending
on exactly what the issue is - e.g. maybe a bad bit in the memory word where
the process table happened to wind up).

    > I could work to extract the core file

The 'ls' one, please (shorter/simpler); I can poke around in that, and see if
I can find any clues as to the cause.

    > probably the best application of effort would be to do develop/run more
    > diagnostics on the MS11-L

OK.

I also have a little memory diag that I wrote myself that you could try. Let
me know if you'd like it; it's currently for the /23+/73 (and it would
probably work on the /70, I'd have to check) so I'd have to tweak a few
things to get it to run on a /45. Best way to get it to you would be to send
you the Unix assembler source, if you can get that onto the disk, then you
could:

  as memptst.s
  mv a.out /memptst

and just boot it.

	Noel


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