[Info-vax] How to mount/unmount CD and tapes on axpbox emulator??

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-11-19 13:57:01 +0000, Timothy Stark said:

Hello Tim, and welcome to the comp.os.vms usenet newsgroup.

> I am figuring out how to mount/unmount CD/tape images on axpbox 
> emulator without shutting system down like on SIMH VAX emulator?

Pending a response to your bug report (below), and given it's an 
emulator, you're not limited by the presence of physical media and 
physical devices, so just keep adding new storage devices with backing 
file storage, and rebooting (or crashing) when you need to swap or 
clean up. This as a workaround.

> When I run axpbox, there is no prompt to change CD/tape images.  There 
> is only way to change es40.cfg file requires system and emulator 
> shutdown.
> 
> Are that plans to add prompt to axpbox emulator to supporting 
> mount/unmount images, etc while running system?

Again, as a workaround pending a fix for the axpbox emulator... Since 
you're using an emulator and not physical hardware, keep adding 
emulated CD "devices", or adding disk devices with backing file storage 
containing the disk images of interest, and don't perturb the existing 
devices and existing mounts.  Maybe try a DISMOUNT/NOUNLOAD of the 
"device" prior to logout, and/or use MOUNT /SYSTEM, both of which would 
avoid what I'm guessing is an unimplemented SCSI 0x1b unload command. 
Or don't log out, and don't shutdown. Or let it crash. OpenVMS tends to 
recover from crashes fairly well, so there's that. I'd suspect that 
some of the folks using axpbox emulator may have not tried the CD path, 
and were mounted disk images from files as the "devices". That is this 
isn't a particularly unusual code-path for OpenVMS.

I don't know whether axpbox supports emulated CDs or if it offers a 
pass-through to the CD/DVD optical media hardware on the host. I've 
seen both approaches used on various emulators.

What follows is for those following along at home:

axpbox emulator: https://github.com/lenticularis39/axpbox
axpbox maintainer: https://github.com/lenticularis39

Tim has already logged a bug report at github and another person has 
then cross-posted my followup to Tim, and that bug report and that 
discussion are here:

https://github.com/lenticularis39/axpbox/issues/36
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms/c/n1ub5iV2zNI/m/f39V-V-KAQAJ

With that bug report logged, Tim will either be waiting for the 
maintainer or somebody else to have a look and submitting a fix or 
enhancement for this within axpbox, or spending some time in the axpbox 
source code and maybe issuing a pull request, or (if this is a priority 
project for Tim) paying somebody to look at this and submit the fix to 
the maintainer.

Folks around here in this newsgroup do tend to know OpenVMS fairly 
well, but the discussions of the axpbox emulator here in the 
comp.os.vms newsgroup go back all of ~two days. Whether the emulator 
maintainer is even aware of this newsgroup is unclear.

Fastest way: pull down the axpbox source code, and have a look at the 
SCSI command parser implementation. This per my previous reply.

And FWIW: this usenet newsgroup well predates the corporate existence 
of Google, and while Google Groups is a web-based front-ends available 
for reading usenet postings, Google is not where this or any other 
usenet newsgroups are hosted. There are various usenet servers around 
the 'net, some free and some available for a fee. This beyond the web 
interface offered at Google.



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