Stuff at the bottom of the screen
Status: Alpha
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iamcamiel
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What are the numbers at the bottom of the screen that keep updating
???
%VGA-I-BIOS: vgabios call ah03 al00 bx0000 cx0023 dx0300
%VGA-I-BIOS: vgabios call ah13 al01 bx000B cx0023 dx0700
28834 | 00000000001338d8
Villy
Hello Villy,
The first number is the number of slow clock-ticks that expired since the emulator was started. (Multiply this by 10,000 to get the number of instructions the CPU has processed); the second number is the current value of the pc (program counter).
Camiel.
Thanks Camiel
I haven't ordered an Alpha install disk yet (had some - but chucked them years ago), but I do notice that the idling machine chews up all available CPU. Is there an idle loop control feature ?
Villy
Hello Villy,
No, there isn't. The emulator doesn't know when the emulated cpu is idle or not (hard to distinguish an idle loop from a loop that does something). We might come up with something like this in the future. If you have any ideas on how to do this, or if you can help in any other way, that would be great.
Camiel.
Camiel
I had worked something out for the SimH VAX emulation that involved adding sleeps in to keep the virtual processor running at about 70% utilization. It involved a task running in VMS that essentially communicated with the simulator through a virtual IO port. I used a DN-11 - which was never supported on the alpha.
That got tossed out when the SimH gents worked out something by monitoring how long VMS spent in a specified IPL level - I never really looked into it in detail - but I can take a look and see. It works quite well - but does require a bit of tweaking to get it working right - that would be easy enough to do in the config file.
Really neat to watch the utilization drop to almost nothing when VMS is idling...
Vill