I did some quick tests on my Raspberry Pi 3 SimH today. This was giving 
repeatable 53 errors in the startup self-tests.

1) Switching to the KA655_test.bin made no difference.
2) commenting out the nvram attach then prompted for language, and on entering 
4 (UK) then ran through the tests without failure.
3) leaving attach in, but renaming away the existing nvram file, did exactly 
the same - no error.
4) after (3), I exited to SimH with CTRL/E and exited SimH with quit. This 
created a new nvram file. Restarting SimH gave same 53 error as original.

Mark, I can send you the nvram file if you want?

My Intel/Windows SimH doesn't seem to giving 53 errors at present, although I'm 
sure I had them intermittently in the past.

Regards,

-- 
Paul Hardy

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Pizzolato [mailto:m...@infocomm.com] 
Sent: 13 November 2017 19:18
To: Jeremy Begg <jer...@vsm.com.au>; simh@trailing-edge.com
Cc: 'Wilm Boerhout' <wboerh...@gmail.com>; paulhar...@btinternet.com
Subject: RE: [Simh] Raspberry Pi 3 with tun/tap causes XQ to fail

On Monday, November 13, 2017 at 2:04 AM, Jeremy Begg wrote:
> I am trying to get SIMH up and running on the ethernet interface of a 
> Raspberry Pi 3.  I have followed the intructions in 
> 0readme_ethernet.txt, installing the libpcap-dev, bridge-utils and 
> uml-utilities packages before building SIMH itself.  I just ran 'make 
> vax' and let it go, and the build to completion.
> 
> My problem is that I just can't get networking going.  To cut to the 
> chase, if I run the simulator without first setting up the br0 and 
> tap0 interfaces, and don't attempt to attach the XQ device, it works 
> fine -- albeit without any networking (as expected).
> 
> If I configure SIMH to attach XQ directly to the Pi's eth0 interface 
> (without configuring br0/tap0) it works on the first run but fails 
> selftest
> 53 on the next run.  If I reboot the Pi and start the br0/tap0 
> interfaces and then run the simulator the VAX console fails selftest 53 again.

Hmm...  I've been trying to track down the 53 test failure, which I can't 
reproduce here.
In general this should not have anything to do with the networking details 
you've got setup, but there might be some influence.

A little background explanation is warranted here.  Long ago, when the extended 
memory was added to the MicroVAX 3900 simulator (extending from 64MB to 512MB), 
I had observed that boot ROM self test interval timer test intermittently 
failed (1 out of 10 times).  At the time, I attributed the failures to 
competing load on the host system while the timer test was running.  To avoid 
potential problem reports from users the interval timer tests were disabled 
with a patch to the ROM image.  The resulting KA655x.bin image was unmodified 
until this past January.  At that time, the timer related plumbing in simh was 
significantly reworked and it seemed like the ROM self tests should now pass 
without the need to side step them.  I re-enabled the tests and, in my testing 
I've run many hundreds of tests without failure, meanwhile there have been some 
reports like yours... :-(

Since you've got a somewhat reproducible test 53 failure, will you please:

1) send me the configuration file you're loading
2) send me the ka655x.bin or ka655.bin file you may be loading in your 
configuration file
3) explicitly load the attached ka655x.bin file prior to booting the simulator 
in your configuration file with:
         sim> load -r ka655x_test.bin
         sim> BOOT  (or BOOT CPU)
4) let me know if you still can observe the self test problems you had 
previously seen.

If the problem is completely solved, then I'll revise the packaged (and 
internal) ka655x.bin ROM image and these problems should be behind us.  If the 
problem persists, then I'll have to look for other ways to address it.

Thanks.

- Mark

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