SITS PDUMP format

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The SITS pure dump format is a core image file format amenable to paging. Most of the file is divided into 8Kbyte pages, suitable for PDP-11 memory management.

The overall structure is: one page with the page table and other metadata, pages with contents for the address spaces, and a symbol table.

Page table

The first page in the file starts with a zero word.

Next comes the page table: 16 words for the instruction space, and 16 for the data space.

The words have this format:

D=I Absolute File Private Execute Write Read Page Length
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00

After the page table comes four words: the starting address, the size of the symbol table in bytes, and the file position of the symbol table as a long word.

The rest of the page is empty.

Content pages

Only pages that are mapped and not absolute have content pages in the file. If a page is both in I and D spaces, the file only has the I copy.

Pages that are shorter than 8K are padded out to a page boundary.

Symbol table

After the last content page comes the symbol table. It does not have to end on a page boundar.