IIRC the rtVAX CPUs have a slightly different (only
one level?) TLB /
page table layout and thus are not able to run *nix. At least not
without adapting the VM subsystem. See the KA620 CPU board.
I don't know about other rtVAXen, if any, but the KA620 I know
reasonably well - I once built the kernel to manage the KA620 in a
dual-processor KA630/KA620 system (and the OS hackery to speak to it
from the KA630's OS, which IIRC was mtXinu
4.3+NFS).
Based on that: the KA620 is just like the KA630, except that P0 and P1
page tables live in physical space instead of kernel virtual space.
That is, P0BR and P1BR must be computed based on the page tables'
physical addresses rather than their kernel virtual addresses. (This
means they need to be physically contiguous rather than virtually
contiguous, which is one potential issue.)
Of course, if you're doing something that never uses P0/P1 space - stay
entirely in kernel mode, or perhaps never even turn on MAPEN at all -
you might be able to totally ignore this. But it won't run VMS, which
I gather is what DEC cared about at the time.
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