TUHS October 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

120 participants
86 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

2 years, 7 months

Unix, IBM, 370

by Warren Toomey

All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ Cheers, Warren P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well.

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out

by Norman Wilson

ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar bookshops any time soon? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 1 month

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Alexander Voropay

Robert Clausecker <fuz(a)fuz.su> wrote: > > I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF > Nice find! It seems to use lcall to selector 7 for system calls. A > similar choice was made in 386BSD all the way through FreeBSD 2.2.8 > where it was replaced with int $0x80 as in Linux. Technically speaking lcall $0x07,$0 uses selector 0 with RPL=3 (bit0 and bit1==1) and LDT (bit2==1) It seems it's oldest way to call kernel from userspace on x86 architecture. AT&T's programmers used this sycall convention for SysVR3 and SysVR4 on i386 (not sure about SysVR2 on i286). There are very few examples with lcall-type syscall i.e. http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf (figure 3-26) (and leaked SysVR4 i386 sources) William Jolitz used this convention in his amazing articles about porting BSD4.3 to the i386 (c)1991 http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1991/0101.html (p."System Call Inteface"). See also 386BSD 0.0: https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/blob/0.0/arch/i386/i386/locore.s#L361 (Did he run AT&T userspace on his kernel ???) As you mentioned, most of early *BSD systems on i386 also used lcall. Linus selected to use "DOS-style" call with INT 0x80. More recent BSD on i386 also use INT. https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscalls http://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html Solaris on x86 (ex. SysVR4) also uses lcall. See a https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/sergey/cs258/solaris-on-x86.pdf p.4.2.3 and Solaris (later OpenSolaris and later Illumos) sourcecode.

5 years, 1 month

Fwd: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129

by Warren Toomey

All, I just received this from Stephen Jones at the LCM+L. ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Jones <StephenJo(a)livingcomputers.org> ----- Subject: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 Hello Folks .. you’ll hear through official channels along with videos and pictures (hopefully soon) that we just got PDP-7 UNICS to boot on a real PDP-7 (sn 129) using our newly designed “JK09” disk drive. The recent posting of source is going to be great .. we’ve been using the simh image that has been available for a while. BTW, compiling the B Hello World on a real 7 is much more satisfying than it is under simh … More to come, please watch Living Computers for updates. (PS sorry we’re late to the BTL party). Stephen M. Jones ----- End forwarded message -----

5 years, 1 month

Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Doug McIlroy

> 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game This game, written by ken, used the Graphic 2. One of its earliest tests--random starting positions and velocities on a frictionless table with no collision detection--produced a mesmerizing result. This was saved in a program called "weird1", which was carried across to the PDP11. Weird1 was a spectacular accidental demonstration of structure in pseudo-random numbers. After several minutes the dots representing pool balls would evanescently form short local alignments. Thereafter from time to time ever-larger alignments would materialize. Finally in a grand climax all the balls converged to a single point. It was stunning to watch perfect order emerge from apparent chaos. One of my fondest hopes is to see weird1 revived. Doug

5 years, 1 month

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Robert Clausecker

Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11 assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax. The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where? I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that. The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris, the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships. Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was the first party to introduce this? Yours, Robert Clausecker [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501 -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments

5 years, 1 month

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Robert Clausecker

5 years, 1 month

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Alexander Voropay

Robert Clausecker <fuz(a)fuz.su>wrote: > The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style > assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. There were alot of AT&T codebase ports to x86 architecture except Xenix: Microport, INTERACTIVE, Everex, Wyse e.t.c. using AT&T x86 syntax. I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF as format for executables: See: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?67736-History-behind-the-disk-ima… (Rather interesting kernel ABI/Call convention) and https://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_SYSVr3 There were also SystemV R2 to i286 ports i.e.: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microport_System_V with a.out binary format.

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is

by Norman Wilson

Bother: Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. Forgot to paste in the URL. Here it is: http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/g-r-emlin/

5 years, 1 month

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TUHS October 2019