Talk:ELF operating system

Code found

I found ELF source files and maybe some binaries in the Saildart archive. I'm trying to contact several of the developers: Retz, Casner, Raveling. The consensus seems to be it's ARPA-funded public domain work. Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 08:07, 28 October 2021 (CEST)

I have heard back from Casner, Raveling, and Miller who all support putting ELF on GitHub. Miller told me Retz is no longer with us. :-( Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 08:09, 12 November 2021 (CET)

There seems to be a lot of stuff still missing from the Github; I was looking for the ANTS/ISI device driver (to do an article on it), but couldn't find it, although I looked at most of the .M11 files (I did find part of the VDH code - I don't think the underlying sync interface code is in what I glanced at). And there are a bunch of ELFxxx.O11 files (which are, I assume, binary; for the OS modules) - but where are the matching M11 files? (We could disassemble them, but we'd be missing the comments - so crucial for assembler code). Jnc (talk) 09:02, 12 November 2021 (CET)

The .O11 files are also source code. ELFNIO.O11 is the ISI/ANTS IMP driver code: "This module is configured at assembly time for use with either a standard ANTS interface or for USC-ISI's modified version of it." Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 12:31, 12 November 2021 (CET)

Ah, thanks; I had tried to download ucbioc.o11, and my browser would only say "8.41 KB - Download - View raw", so I assumed that with a filename like that, it must be object code (binary). I wonder what the etymology of ".o11" is, and why they aren't ".m11"?

I see the file has a lot of ASCII NULs in it. Those confuse my editor (Epsilon, an EMACS clone) somewhat: they display OK, and I can manually delete them, but an attempt to give a NUL to any string replace' command (to get rid of the whole lot in one operation) confuses it - probably because it's written in C, and the NUL is being mistakenly interpreted as an 'end of input string' marker! If I really wanted to work with one, I'll probably have to write a short program to strip them out. Jnc (talk) 15:34, 12 November 2021 (CET)

VDH interface

Huh; the base address given for the VDH interface ("VDHSI = 167600") is that which some DEC sources claim to be that of the DR11-C; but the register layout doesn't look anything like a DR11-C. (Nor a DR11-B either.) I'm a bit surprised it's not a stock DEC synchronous serial line interface, but this looks like a DMA interface ("M.A.R. IN" = 'memory address register in'; "W.C. IN" = 'word count in'), which makes sense, because even a VDH was a pretty fast interface (I think they could be 56K, although IIRC some were 9600); and the first DEC DMA synchronous serial line interface was the DQ11. Jnc (talk) 10:52, 12 November 2021 (CET)