[TUHS] Unix on an 11/23 (Was: Work I've done with a PDP-11 simulator)

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    >> I got one PDP-11/23-PLUS without any kind of disk (by now, I got one
    >> RL12 board plus one RL02 drive pending of cleaning and arrangement)...
    >> I guess if could be possible to run V6 in this machine. There's any
    >> kind of adaptation of this Unix version (or whatever) to run under ?

    > IIRC the README page for that set of disk images indicates that in fact
    > they originally came off an 11/23, so they should run fine on yours.

So I was idly looking through main.c for the Shoppa Unix (because it printed
some unusual messages when it started, and I wanted to see that code), and I
noticed it had some fancy code for dealing with the clock, and that tickled a
very dim memory that LSI-11's had some unusual clock thing. So I decided I
had better check up on that...

I got out an LSI-11 manual, and it looked like the 23 should work, even for
the 'vanilla' V6 from the Bell distro. But I decided I had better check it to
be sure, so I fired up the simulator, mounted a Bell disk, set the cpu type
to '23', and booted 'rkunix'. Which promptly halted!

After a bit of digging, it turned out that the problem is that the 11/23
doesn't have a switch register! It hit a kernel NXM trying to touch it -
and then another trying to read it in the putchar() routine trying to do a
panic(), at which point it died a horrible death.

So I added a SR (you can create all sorts of bizarre hybrids like that with
Ersatz-11, like 11/40's with 11/45 type floating point :-), and then it
booted fine. The clock even worked!


So you will have to use the Shoppa disk to boot (but see below), or we'll
have to spin you a special vanilla V6 Unix that doesn't try to touch the SR -
that shouldn't be much work, I only found two place in the code that touch it.

I did try the Shoppa 'unix', and it booted fine on an 11/23.

Two things to check for, though: first, your 11/23 _has_ to have the MMU chip
(that's the large DIP package with one chip on it nearest the edge of the
card), so if yours looks like this:

  http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/Images/23.jpeg

you're OK. Without the MMU chip, most variants of Unix will not run on the 23
(although there's something called MiniUnix, IIRC, which runs on an LSI-11,
which would probably run on a /23 without an MMU).


Here's the part that might be a problem: To run any of the Unixes on the
Shoppa disk, you also have to have the FPP chip too (that's the second large
DIP package with two chips on it - the image above does not include that
chip, so if yours looks like that, you have a minor problem, and I will have
to build you a Unix or something).

All of the Unixes on the Shoppa disk have to have the FPP, except one - and
that one wants an RX floppy as the root/swap device! The others will all
crash (I tried one, to make sure) if you try and boot them on an 11/23
without the FPP.

I could try patching the binary on the one that doesn't expect to use the FPP
to use the RL as the root, or either i) build you a vanilla V6 for a 23
(above), or ii) figure out how to build systems on the Shoppa disk, and build
you a Unix there which i) uses the RL as the root/swap, and ii) does not
expect to have the FPP.

But let's first find out exactly what you have...

	Noel