[Info-vax] how to extract and install content from vms073lp.zip

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Simon Clubley wrote 2012-04-01 14:41:
> On 2012-04-01, Paul Sture<paul at sture.ch>  wrote:
>> On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:36:28 +0000, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>
>>> On 2012-03-31, Qunying<zhu.qunying at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> ; Define disk drive types. RA92 is largest-supported VAX drive set rq0
>>>> ra92
>>>> set rq1 ra92
>>>> set rq2 ra92
>>>> set rq3 cdrom
>>>>
>>>> ; Attach defined drives to local files attach rq0
>>>> /home/qunying/vms/data/d0.dsk attach rq1 /home/qunying/vms/data/d1.dsk
>>>> attach rq2 /home/qunying/vms/data/d2.dsk
>>>>
>>>>
>>> The only part of your host filesystem which is used is the part used to
>>> store these files and unless SimH has acquired some form of dynamic disk
>>> resizing (it's been a few years since I last used SimH so I am just
>>> covering all possibilities :-)), the size must be consistant with the
>>> emulated device.
>>>
>>
>> See the section "The Variable-sized RAUSER device" at:
>>
>> http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922
>>
>> "The following creates a generic RA-series disk with 20,000 512-byte
>> block capacity:
>>
>> set -L rq0 rauser=20000
>>
>> RAUSER is specified in 512-byte disk blocks (with the -L option) (and in
>> units of mebibytes (MiB) without), and can range up to 2 gibibytes (2 GiB)
>> when simh is compiled and running with 32-bit addressing, and up to one
>> tebibyte (1 TiB) when simh is compiled and running with 64-bit
>> addressing. The backing file must be of at least sufficient capacity for
>> the specified RAUSER size."
>>
>
> That's interesting; I didn't know about that.
>
> That was one part of what I was thinking about above, but the other part
> I was thinking of was some form of true dynamic resizing during use
> somehow as the free blocks on the emulated device moved towards zero.
>

I guess the problem here is that INIT allocates a BITMAP.SYS that
matches the size of the volume.

Newer VMS'es (Alpha/IA64) supports (pre-) allocating a larger BITMAP.SYS
and supports dynamic resize.

> Given that it's a software emulation, I wasn't 100% sure that someone
> had not written some hooks into the emulator to gain access to what would
> otherwise be opaque details (such as the ODS-2 free volume space count)
> when viewed at emulator level.
>
> Simon.
>