On 2015-05-18 17:46, John Forecast wrote:
CASTOR:: was the M+ group?s 11/74 housed in it?s own
machine room in ZK. Since the machine hardware could be relatively easily reconfigured,
POLLUX:: was reserved for when the system was running as 2 independent nodes (3+1 or 2+2
CPUs). The DECnet group had a dual processor system with node name ELROND::.
I used CASTOR:: standalone a couple of times while debugging the MP changes to the DECnet
kernel code until ELROND:: became stable. Eventually, ELROND:: became the timesharing
system for the DECnet-RSX group.
The lack of cache-coherency and the limited work-arounds (cache-bypass or cache flushing)
meant that all the DECnet kernel code, both drivers and protocol stack, ran with
cache-bypass enabled on its data PDRs. So the networking code on an MP system had lower
peak performance than on a normal 11/70 although you would never notice the difference in
regular operation.
Thanks for the corrections and clarifications, John. I think I've heard
this before, but my memory is constantly failing me.
Also, nice work! The DECnet code works just fine in MP.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol