> On Aug 18, 2015, at 2:00 PM, Johnny Billquist <b...@update.uu.se> wrote:
> 
> On 2015-08-18 19:05, Jon Elson wrote:
> ...
>> Most likely, some board was added or removed from the system before you
>> got it, and it caused the vector to now be wrong.
> 
> The vector is usually not the first victim. The CSR address is, which cause 
> all access to the controller to fail. But the vector often also move, causing 
> the more obscure errors. However, most DEC OSes actually autodetected the 
> vetor, and did not care about the actual floating assignment rules for the 
> vectors.
> The thing is, all you need is to trigger an interrupt on the device, and then 
> notice at what vector it came in, and then you go with that. This only fails 
> when several devices happen to use the same vector.

Typically that would be detected as a configuration error — two devices whose 
autodetected vector matches.  One of the offending devices (the one seen later, 
presumably) would end up disabled.

> 
>> In some cases, you had to force a device to be at a non-standard
>> address, possibly because a 3rd party device could not be configured at
>> the address the DEC enumeration scheme wanted to put it at.  This was
>> pretty easy to do in later VMS systems.
> 
> Very easy to do in RSX-11M-PLUS as well. A simple one line command, which can 
> be done on the running system.

And RSTS, starting with V5B.

        paul

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