Re: Architectural implications of locate mode I/O

On 2 Jul 2024, MitchAlsup1 wrote
(in article<8bfe4d34bae396114050ad1000f4f31c@www.novabbs.org>):

Once you recognize that I/O is eating up your precious CPU, and you
get to the point you are willing to expend another fixed programmed
device to make the I/O burden manageable, then you basically have
CDC 6600 Peripheral Processors, programmed in code or microcode.

The EE KDF9 (~1960) allowed up to 16 connected devices at a time.
They all did DMA, interrupting only at the end of the transfer.
Slow devices accessed the core store for each character,
fast devices did so for each word.

This was mediated by one of the KDF9's many state machines,
I/O Control, which multiplexed core requests from devices
and interrupted the CPU at the end of a transfer
if the transfer had been initiated by a program
of higherCPU priority than the one currently running,
or if there was a possibility of priority inversion.

I/O Control also autonomously re-issued an I/O command
to a device that reported a parity error
if that device was capable of retrying the transfer
(e.g. MT controllers could backspace a block and re-read).

--
Bill Findlay