Wednesday, July 1, 2015

VM/370 up and running on P390, digging into the ztex fpga board issue for SAC Interface box

P390 SYSTEM CHECKOUT

I found a five pack VM system set up to run with the 4K protect key modification - loaded it up on P390 and brought it up successfully. While I was working on the system and remembering my CP and CMS commands, some very unusual raindrops began falling (unusual to have any rain at all in July). I had to move the monitor, keyboard and mouse inside, necessitating a shutdown.

I went back to the DOS/VS generation but continue to have a problem booting the distribution tape, which should have on it a disk init utility, then the disk restore program and finally the contents of the disk pack being restored. It just won't boot, which causes me to suspect that I don't have a good file of that distribution tape. I say this because I used a similar tape file for the VM process and it worked flawlessly.

SAC INTERFACE FOR ADDING PERIPHERALS TO THE 1130

I moved my fpga bitfile over to the home deskside computer, which also had the ztex software installed, and loaded the file to the ztex board flash. It reported successful loading but once again wouldn't boot from the saved image. The problem is clearly in the way that Xilinx ISE generates the file. May have to install a second instance of ISE on the deskside machine just to produce bitfiles that work with the Ztex board.

Richard Stofer is also investigating this using my project and bitfile, but on his end using his systems. We are exchanging some test files now to try to zero in on the problems I am having.



No comments:

Post a Comment