Now you can run 32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD on a VAX-11/780 simulated by SIMH. Please refer to SIMH site for the requirement for running SIMH.

Step 0:

Fetch bzip2'ed tar archive or gzip'ed tar archive of necessary files and the SIMH source. Unzip simh archive and apply my patch to your copy of SIMH.

% mkdir work↓
% cd work↓
% unzip -a ../simhv37-0.zip↓
Archive:  ../simhv37-0.zip
  inflating: 0readme_37.txt          [text]
snipped
  inflating: VAX/vmb.exe             [binary]
% patch -p1 < ../simhv37-0.starunix.patch↓

Generate a VAX11-780 emulater. Edit makefile if you need.

% mkdir BIN↓
% gmake vax780 CC="gcc -O2 -g -lm -I."↓
gcc -O2 -g -lm -I. VAX/vax_cpu.c VAX/vax_cpu1.c VAX/vax_fpa.c VAX/vax_cis.c VAX/vax_octa.c VAX/vax_cmode.c VAX/vax_mmu.c VAX/vax_sys.c VAX/vax_syscm.c VAX/vax780_stddev.c VAX/vax780_sbi.c VAX/vax780_mem.c VAX/vax780_uba.c VAX/vax780_mba.c VAX/vax780_fload.c VAX/vax780_syslist.c PDP11/pdp11_rl.c PDP11/pdp11_rq.c PDP11/pdp11_ts.c PDP11/pdp11_dz.c PDP11/pdp11_lp.c PDP11/pdp11_tq.c PDP11/pdp11_xu.c PDP11/pdp11_ry.c PDP11/pdp11_cr.c PDP11/pdp11_rp.c PDP11/pdp11_tu.c PDP11/pdp11_hk.c scp.c sim_console.c sim_fio.c sim_timer.c sim_sock.c sim_tmxr.c sim_ether.c sim_tape.c -DVM_VAX -DVAX_780 -DUSE_INT64 -DUSE_ADDR64 -I VAX -I PDP11 -o BIN/vax780
% ls -l BIN/vax780↓
-rwxr-xr-x  1 nao  user  924915 Mar 12 23:34 BIN/vax780*

Install the executable file.

Next steps:

Note that there are some differences from the original VAX-11/780:

Disk drives do not support formatting.
Console monitor is substituted by SIMH command.
Console floppy is substituted by SIMH initial file.

The idea is quite simple. I prepared two initial files for each UNIX. Begin installation by using `tboot.init' for tape boot. Skip checking and formatting the hard disk. Once you have a root filesystem in your hard disk, boot it by using `dboot.init' for disk boot.

Tool:

File mktape.cfor generating a distribution tape image.

Source:

I forged distribution tape images from the files located in Unix Archive of TUHS and CSRG Archive CD-ROMs. I tried to make them functionally equivalent to the original, honestly, not so diligently.

History:

Apr 26, 2007: Initial version.

By nao at tom hypen yam dot or dot jp (anti-spam encoded).