Re: KA655 Kernel Compile and Corrupt Object Files

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> Yeah, it do seem it is non-deterministic. But even more weird is that
> most object files come out differently (even when valid) on simh
> compared to real hardware.  But both "valid".

I suspect that the real-hardware files are (almost?) always corrupted;
it's just that only occasionally does the corruption strike something
noticed by ld, instead usually damaging something internal, something
that's not causing obvious trouble at link time because all it does is
change an instruction or some such.  The resulting kernel, if it did
manage to link, may well explode severely.

On reflection, I would say this feels to me more like flaky RAM or a
dodgy DMA channel to the Ethernet or some such, rather than flaky CPU.

Notice that (quoting the original post, albeit manually rewrapped from
the original's paragraph-length line):

> When comparing two different hardware compilations, it was observed
> that their object files (including which files were corrupted)
> differed.

This reinforces my suspicion that all, or almost all, the
hardware-compiled files are corrupted, just only occasionally corrupted
in a way that causes the link to fail.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B