BDV11 Bus Terminator/ROM

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Revision as of 13:12, 28 November 2017 by Jnc (talk | contribs) (KW11-L issue: More detail on LTC clear)
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The BDV11 Bus Terminator/ROM board is a QBUS board that includes:

Physically, it is a quad board, M8012.

Bus termination upgrade

The BDV11 only provides termination for a Q18 QBUS; there is a relatively easy ECO to extend it to Q22, since there are 4 spare resistor networks available in one of the resistor packs.

KW11-L issue

NOTE: Once the KW11-L on a BDV11 has been enabled, RESET/etc do not disable it, unlike every other device in the PDP-11 universe! (This is apparently because they were short a QBUS receiver for the BINIT bus line, and didn't want to add another complete chip to be able to monitor it.) It is, however, disabled by the on-board RESTART switch.

So if you start some operating system which enables the KW11-L (e.g. UNIX), and then try and re-boot it using a front console 'Restart' switch, or by halting the machine and using the 'Go' command to ODT, you'll probably get a clock interrupt in the process of booting, which will trash it.

The only thing that clears it is a manual disable (write 0 to the KW11-L's CSR), using the BDV11's RESTART switch, or power cycling the machine.

Caveat haquur!