M7264 Troubleshooting

[Noel Chiappa]

A follow-up to close out something:

    > OK, now a picture of the bus with no console card:

    > http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/jpg/BSYN-BDAL_NoMem.jpg
    [Note: image re-named, to correctly say what it's showing]

    > It's a bit hard to interpret what's going on here .. The long assertion
    > of BSYNC is undoubtly the CPU trying to get the console CSR to respond,
    > and eventually timing out.  Not sure what the short assertion following
    > it is - without looking at the ucode for the ODT, there's no way to know
    > what the CPU's doing.

    > Even harder to understand is what the BDAL line is doing. It looks like
    > it's un-asserted (0, i.e. +3V) on the falling (electrically - rising,
    > logically) edge of BSYN (which would be incorrect - see above). And then
    > it hops around while BSYNC is asserted, which makes no sense at all to
    > me.

So this makes a little more sense now.

This is actually showing a NXM cycle to main memory (apparently to address 0),
hence the '0' on BDAL10. (The second assertion of BSYNC must be somehow
associated with the NXM.) Apparently it doesn't even try to talk to the
console card unless the memory is there OK; if it can't see the memory, it
must just reset and try again.

Here:

    > http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/jpg/BSYN-BDAL_NoCon.jpg

is a system with memory, but without a console. A very similar picture, but
here BDAL10 _is_ '1', as expected.


So the original picture did in fact indicate what the problem was - had I
known enough to know how to interpret it! Schaeffer's Law strikes again!

Although I still don't understand why the LSI-11 wants to see main memory on
the bus, in order for ODT to run. ODT doesn't use memory at all; ODT on the
KDF11 CPUs will run without any memory.

      Noel