TUHS August 2020

tuhs@tuhs.org

61 participants
55 discussions

by Warner Losh

Greetings, What's the canonical source for patches to 2.9BSD and 2.11BSD? I see we have 2.11BSD patch 469 dated last month in the archive. Where does it come from? Has anybody climbed the hill to import all the patches into a git repo? I've found some mirrors, but moe.2bsd.org has been down for me for ages... How does Warren keep things up to date? I also have a (maybe faulty) memory of a similar series of patches to 2.9BSD because it was the last BSD to support non-split I&D space machines. yet a quick google search turns up nothing other than a set of patches dated August 1985 (also in our archive) and some changes for variants of hardware (pro, mscp). Is that it? Warner

1 year, 8 months

Old UNIX file system formats

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

H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks

by Grant Taylor

Is it okay for me to ask a question about Linux that's from '91~'92? Does anyone happen to have copies of H.J. Lu's Bootable Root and the associated Linux Base System disk images from the early '90s? I've managed to find a copy of 0.98.pl5-31 bootable root disk. But I can't find any base disks to go along with it. The files used to be on tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/GCC in rootdisk and basedisk subdirectories. Unfortunately all of the mirrors I'm finding of tsx-11 are newer, have the basedisk directories, but no image files there in. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

3 years, 6 months

Status of Net/2

by Warner Losh

What's the current status of net/2? I ask because I have a FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 CVS repo that I'd like to make available. Some of the files in it are encumbered, though, and the University of California has communicated that fact. But what does that actually mean now that V7 has been released and that's what the files were based on? Are they no longer encumbered? Warner

3 years, 7 months

Vint Cerf tests positive for COVID-19.

by Dan Cross

He announced it on Twitter. I'm sure we all wish him well and a speedy recovery. Note, his tweet says that he is recovering. https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?s=20

3 years, 7 months

reboot(2) system call

by Warner Losh

I've done some research for a friend about when the reboot() system call was added, and how it related to the sync, sync, sync dance. https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/when-unix-learned-to-reboot2.html may be of interest. Please do let me know if I've gotten something wrong... Warner

3 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jim Geist > When did mmap(2) come about? Pretty sure it's a Berserkleyism. I think it came in with the VM stuff that DARPA mandated for VAX Unix (for the research project they funded). Noel

3 years, 10 months

/bin vs /sbin

by Grant Taylor

One of the things that I've noticed in my explorations into the H.J. Lu bootable root disks is that some of them predate the /sbin split in Linux. One of them has exactly one file in /sbin and other commands spread across /bin, /usr/bin, and /etc. The single file in /sbin is sln. To me, this makes it fairly self evident that /sbin was originally for statically linked binaries. At least in Linux. Does anyone have any history of /sbin from other traditional Unixes? I'd be quite interested in learning more. I also noticed that (at least) one of the early versions of the H.J. Lu disks had root's home directory in /usr/root. I seem to recall that one version used an atypical of /users vs /usr. Which as I understand it, goes back to the original / vs /usr split in Unix, before /home became a thing. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

3 years, 10 months

Troff to ps

by Will Senn

All, So... I've moved on from v7 to 2.11bsd - shucks, vi and tar and co. just work there and everything else seems to be similar enough for what I'm interested in anyway. So yay, I won't be pestering y'all about vi anymore :). One the other hand, now I'm interested in printing the docs. 2.11bsd comes with docs in, of all places, /usr/doc. In there are makefiles for making the docs - ok, make nroff will make ascii docs, and troff will make troff? docs using Ossana's 'original' troff. So, after adding -t to it so it didn't complain about 'typesetter busy', I got no errors. I mounted a tape, tar'ed my .out file and untar'ed it on my macbook (did it for the nroff and troff output). Then I hit the first snag, groff -Tps -ms troff.out > whatever.ps resulted in cannot adjust line and cannot break line errors and groff -Tps -ms nroff.out > whatever.ps resulted in a bunch of double vision. I seem to recall doing this in v6 and it working ok (at least for nroff). My questions: 1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a stock 2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)? 2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system? 3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output from the nroff/troff that 2.11 has? I'm still digging into the nroff stuff as that may be just minor diffs between ancient nroff macros and "modern" macros or even just errors (.sp -2 rather than .sp or .sp -1, .in -2 instead of .in +2), etc. Although, the files display ok in 2.11bsd using nroff -ms nroff.out... Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

3 years, 10 months

Status of Space Travel

by Warner Losh

What's the current state of efforts to get space travel working again? Warner

4 years, 2 months

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TUHS August 2020