I'm no Computer Scientist, but I did get a four year degree in CS from a
real University.
Seems like a hardware emulation could be superior to an OS emulator in many
ways, but I have the following questions or comments:
1) Would hardware emulation take more processing power than an OS emulator?
2) Does your VAX emulator provide bridges or gateways to the native OS or
hardware? (Is such even desireable?)
3) For MPE to run directly (ie. loaded directly from HP tapes) wouldn't you
have to emulate the entire HP3000 architecture?
4) Could you emulate multiprocessor 3K hardware config (or, would you need
to?)
5) Seems that if you implement a truely portable HP3K hardware
implementation, as more modern host hardware becomes available, you could
end up with a more powerful MPE box than you could ever have with real 3K
hardware - cheaper too!
6) How much would we be restricted to peripherals and storage that are
compatable with a real HP3K, and how much could we use non-3K components
(ie. tape drives, DASD, NICs, DTCs[less important]?
Thanks,
Dave Darnell
Robert Boers <[log in to unmask]>@RAVEN.UTC.EDU> on 02/03/2002
02:02:19 AM
Please respond to Robert Boers <[log in to unmask]>
Sent by: HP-3000 Systems Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
cc:
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] MPE emulator
It is correct that we did not get much response about my note about
hardware
emulation. Possibly because our experience with the VAX and PDP-11
emulators
is that the concept is often confused with Operating System emulation, and
the assumption is that recompiling would be necessary or that not all
applications will run.
The hardware emulators we build are operating system independent. The demo
we use to show the concept is to unplug a SCSI system disk from a VAX, plug
it into a SCSI port of a PC and boot VMS (or another VAX operating system)
from it. We do not need to convert the binary VAX code in any way or form.
Performance is not an issue, we have reached VAX 7000 Dhrystone performance
on a PC.
The emulator engine we use is likely flexible enough for the HP3000
hardware
(we use the same for PDP-11 and VAX). The core VAX emulator prototype (CPU,
memory, disks) took less than 4 months to develop.
It took us about a year to convince Compaq to support their software on our
VAX emulator as any other VAX. We did that by passing their VAX hardware
diagnostics and architecture tests. They now offer very reasonably priced
VMS transfer licenses
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/sri-charon-vax-emulator.html
Robert Boers
CEO Software Resources International
"Jerry Leslie" <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:a3eo96$ki9$2@joe.rice.edu...
> Wyell Grunwald ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
> : PDP machines and VAX machines have an emulator out there that runs
> : on Windows 2000. This seems like a great idea for MPE ! How come
> : there is not more excitement about this ? See:
> : http://www.softresint.com/
>
> Dunno, a gentleman from SRI posted an article about their emulation
> technology a few weeks ago, but didn't get much response.
>
> --Jerry Leslie (my opinions are strictly my own)
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