TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

29 participants
6557 discussions

by Warner Losh

For a presentation I'm doing this summer on FreeBSD, I thought it would be cool to get the kernel sizes for various old flavors of Unix. I see numbers for v5, v6 and v7 in the tuhs tree view, and it appears these versions are complete enough for me to extract the kernels themselves. However, I see nothing prior to that. The archives seem to be somewhat incomplete, but I'm wondering if people have sizes for earlier versions. Later versions are more problematic because they move to new hardware, instruction sets, etc. For this graph to be meaningful, it would need to be pdp-11 only, though I'm of the opinion more data is better than less. I'll also be extracting the different V7 commercial kernels: V7M, Ultrix and Venix and the BSD 2.x releases, but those appear to be intact enough in the archives to extract data on my own. I've heard rumors there's a SysV for the pdp-11, but I've not been able to locate images for that. I don't need the actual images, just sizes with some reference for the source of the data. It's just for one slide in the talk, so I don't want to burn a ton of time on it... The larger picture is that I've written what's effectively modprobe for FreeBSD and will be talking about it in detail. How it's like modprobe, how it's different, how all the pieces fit together, history of similar efforts, etc. Part of the driving force here is the bloated FreeBSD GENERIC kernel. Of course, I'll share the final report I'm planning on sizes with the group. Thanks for any data you can provide. Warner

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Kernel Sizes

by Paul Ruizendaal

> A self-imposed limit of 16K held in v1, and was quite fully utilized. > When the iernel was rewritten in C, the limit (perhaps larger by then) > influenced the C compiler. More than one optimization was stimulated > by the need to keep the kernel in bounds. > > Doug The LSX kernel was kept within a self-imposed limit of 16KB as well. I've often thought that LSX was V5 'regressed' to the concepts of V1, which was facing similar hardware constraints. Is that a reasonable view? For example, LSX has a maximum of three processes that are swapped in and out in a stack-like fashion. Only one process is ever in core. Is that how V1 was organized? I realize that LSX was API compatible with V5/V6 and I don't mean 'regressed' in that sense. Paul

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Kernel Sizes

by Doug McIlroy

> I seem to remember that at some point early on, we spent some of our > capital budget on buying another 16K bytes for the PDP-11. As I > recall, the deal was that the OS got 8K and users got 8K. I also > recall that that purchase was 20% of our capital budget for the > year... > Doug, did I remember this correctly? > Steve Things did happen that way. I don't specifically remember the numbers, but those you state have the ring of truth. Memory came in (expensive) 4K increments. When the keepers of Unix in the Charlotte wire center wanted to add 4K, their management consented only on the condition that the wizards in Research would confirm that roposed new functionality really required it. doug

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Kernel Sizes

by Doug McIlroy

>> A self-imposed limit of 16K held in v1 > 16k words or 16k bytes? Bytes. doug

7 years, 7 months

Subject: Re: KernelSizesA self-imposed limit of 16K held in v1, and was quite fullyutilized.Subject:Re: Kernel Sizes

by Doug McIlroy

A self-imposed limit of 16K held in v1, and was quite fully utilized. When the iernel was rewritten in C, the limit (perhaps larger by then) influenced the C compiler. More than one optimization was stimulated by the need to keep the kernel in bounds. Doug

7 years, 7 months

OT - Has anyone seen / have a copy of computer lore story about a DC consolidation?

by Grant Taylor

Sorry for the off topic post. I'm hoping that someone here might have seen a (what I consider to be) a computer lore type story about a contractor that was brought in part way through a project to consolidate three DCs into one. - In the end he managed to do it early and under budget. The kicker is that they quite literally physically moved and re-connected everything the way that it was. Meaning that there were still WAN circuits (local only of course) between equipment that was previously in different DCs. I would like to find a copy of this story and save it in my archive. But I've not been able to do so. Thus I'm asking a wider audience to see if anyone might be able to give me a pointer. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

7 years, 7 months

RIP Ed Yourdon

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Ed Yourdon on this day in 2016; a computer pioneer, he helped to design the underpinnings of relational databases, and pretty much wrote the book. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

Happy birthday, John Lions!

by Dave Horsfall

Dr. Prof. John Lions was born on this day in 1937; I had the pleasure of having him as one of my Computer Science lecturers in the early 70s, and he drilled into us the Principle of Least Astonishment (or POLA), better known as "why the fsck did it do that?" (but he was far too genteel to express it that way). And yes, that's my name in the credits; I helped with the proof-reading and provided the use of the high-quality printer in the CSU. You are not expected to understand this. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

Scot Hacker's 1999-2001 "BeView" columns for Byte.com (BeOS)

by Arrigo Triulzi

Scot Hacker has re-published his BeOS columns for Byte. BeOS was an interesting operating system with a clear Unix inheritance built for a dual-PowerPC system, similar to the Macs of that era. http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/ Its inheritance can be found in Haiku (https://www.haiku-os.org) Arrigo

7 years, 7 months

Some resources for V6/PDP/SIMH newbs like me

by Will Senn

All, While it's fresh, I thought I'd share some resources I've found helpful in learning about the venerable v6 as a relative newb... Learning Unix V6 in the modern era is an interesting and enormously educational experience. In the process of using it I have had to learn how to host it in a simulator (SimH in my case, but there are others), install it, communicate with it, configure it, build special files for it, attach devices to it, communicate with the devices attached to it and to SimH, build a kernel, install the kernel, boot the kernel, work with a variety of media intended to work with it, extend it, and so on. In addition, I have had to learn a bit about the PDP-11 (as arguably the most convenient architecture for learning about V6), about its architecture, its instruction set, its devices, its memory structure, and so on. None of this exploration would have been possible without the excellent work of Bob Supnik, Mark Pizzolato, and co. on the SimH pdp-11 simulator, the Simh mailing list, Warren Toomey and TUHS for making the bits available, the TUHS mailing list, PUPS, Bitsavers, and a slew of readily available documentation and texts including these notables: Setting Up Unix 6th Edition from the V6 Programmer's Manual The Unix V6 Programmer's Manual in its entirety The SimH and SimH PDP-11 Manuals A large number of blogs with SimH specific V6 installation logs The V6 Source Code and man pages (don't forget to install man - the 1bsd version works, and is superior)! The DEC PDP-11/05-10-35-40 1973 Handbook (the 11/40 handbook is not as detailed with respect to memory management) Lions's Commentary on the Sixth Edition source code Now that I'm over the beginner's hump, so to speak, I'm exploring things differently and I thought I'd share some resources that I am currently finding useful and interesting in my explorations... To bone up on assembly language, Lions's commentary is exceptionally helpful in explaining assembly as it is implemented in V6. The manual itself is really thin, and the source is a bit cryptic, for the newcomer. Lions explains the idioms used in the main source of V6. However, without a background in assembly language, Lions is pretty meaningless, so I went looking for something that was PDP specific that would bridge the gap and help me understand Lions's words. I found a number of texts that were really good. Most require a working RT11 instance to actually try out the coding examples and do the exercises (SimH and Bitsavers to the rescue): Arthur Gill - Machine and Assembly Language Programming of the Pdp-11 Charles A. Kapps and Robert L. Stafford - Assembly Language for the PDP-11 Glenn H. MacEwan - Introduction to Computer Systems: Using the PDP-11 and Pascal James F. Peters - The Digital Way: Macro-11 Assembler Programming (PDP-11) Michael G. Schneider - The Principles of Computer Organization: With Assembly Language Programming for the PDP-11 PDP-11 Processor Handbook (pretty much any edition) Thomas A. Frank - Introduction to the PDP-11 and its Assembly Language All of these are useable with a running RT11 instance. But, I think the Peters and Frank books are the standouts. Peters because all of the exercises that I have tried (dozens) have worked as printed and Frank because he is rigorous in his treatment of the subject and builds up from digital logic all the way through program execution. Frank is an excellent complement to Lions work because he explains the details that Lions assumes. To learn about digital logic, and a special thanks to Warren for his work on Crazy Small CPU, I have been introduced to logisim. It is a great playground for exploring digital logic. I had no idea that a sketchpad for digital logic simulation was available and accessible to the layperson. Logisim development stopped around 2014 and while there are a number of successors out there, I am using logisim-evolution: https://github.com/reds-heig/logisim-evolution The rabbit trails never seem to end... in order to learn how to use logisim, I went through the excellent tutorial and then went looking for a book of experiments in digital logic and found: digital computer lab workbook from 1969 http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/handbooks/Digital_Computer_Lab_W… digital equipment corporation computer lab teacher's guide from 1968 http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/pdf/ComputerLabTeachersGuide.pdf These two are useable with very little modification as a source of digital logic exercises that work great with logisim and are related to the architectural lineage of the PDP-11. These resources fit together nicely in my pursuit to better understand digital logic, the pdp-11, assembly language, and unix v6. In sum: Source code for v6 for what really is supposed to happen in v6 operation Lions for understanding Unix V6 sources and for unix assembly language information PDP-11 Hanbook for quick reference on PDP-11 assembly language instruction set Frank for assembly language details and for details on digital logic and its relationship to the PDP-11 architecture. Logisim to test logic constructs The digital lab workbook for practice with digital logic Later, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] origin of C header files

by Lars Brinkhoff

The book "Expert C Programming" claims Alan Snyder suggested the addition of a preprocessor.

7 years, 7 months

2018: eighteen months to the Unix 50th anniversary

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, Happy New Year. As it's now only eighteen months to the Unix 50th Anniversary, I thought I'd poll you all to get an update of what is being done to celebrate the anniversary, and/or what could we organise that has not yet been organised. Cheers, Warren

7 years, 7 months

Happy birthday, C.A.R. Hoare!

by Dave Horsfall

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng was born on this day in 1934; a computer pioneer (one of the greats) he gave us things like the quicksort algorithm and ALGOLW (a neat language). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] 2018: eighteen months to the Unix 50th anniversary

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: George Michaelson > Try this on the birth of the ICL 2900. Along the same lines, there's this: https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=GenesisForProjects with its great closing line.. Noel

7 years, 7 months

Happy birthday, Donald Knuth!

by Dave Horsfall

Computer pioneer Donald Knuth was born on this day in 1938; amongst other things he gave us the TeX typesetting language, and he's still working on "The Art Of Computer Programming" fascicles (I only got as far as the first two volumes). I really must have a look at his new MMIX, too; I love learning new programming languages (I've used about 50 the last time I looked, and I'm happy to post a list for my coterie of disbelievers). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} 2018: eighteen months of the Unix 50th anniversary

by Doug McIlroy

> I will be happy to forward pertinent suggestions. Here's one. If Bell Labs holds some kind of symposium on the lines of the dmr memorial, how about a plenary session with TV participation from remote venues (think Berkeley/Silicon Valley and Wollongong/Sydney--a nine-hour span of time zones). Any thoughts about this or other possibilities? Doug

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} 2018: eighteen months of the Unix 50th anniversary

by Doug McIlroy

I don't think I'm violating anyone's confidentiality by revealing that Marcus Weldon, current president of the Labs, at the suggestion of Martin Carroll, expects the Labs to embark soon on plans to mark the occasion. I, and no doubt Martin, will keep you posted. Meanwhile I will be happy to forward pertinent suggestions. Doug

7 years, 7 months

RIP John Mauchly

by Dave Horsfall

We lost a co-inventor of ENIAC, John Mauchly, on this day (that's 8th January like my headers say) in 1980. ENIAC is claimed to be the "first general purpose electronic digital computer", but I guess it comes down to a matter of definition[*], as every culture likes to be the "first" (just ask the Penguins, for example); for "computer" you could go all the way back to the Mk-I Antikythera (Hellenic variation, from about the 100BC production run)... [*] Analogue/digital/hybrid Mechanical/electrical/electronic/hybrid General/special Wired/programmable/Turing Prototype/production Harvard/Neumann/quantum Etc... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Andy Kosela > it appears this is a fundamental Intel bug that exists in all x86_64 > CPUs. I'm highly amused by the irony. Intel throws bazillions of transistors at these hyper-complex CPUs in an attempt to make them as fast as possible - and (probably because of the complexity) missed a bug, the fix for which involves... slowing things way down! I wonder how many other bugs are lurking in these hyper-complex designs? Didn't anyone at Intel stop to think that complexity is bad, in and of itself? But I guess the market demands for faster and faster machines outweighed that - until it bit them in the posterior. The real question is 'how many more times will it have to happen before they get a clue'? There's an interesting parallel between this, and uSloth's struggle with security and bugs. For a long time, it seemed it was more important to the market to add features (i.e. complexity), and security be damned - until poor security really started to become an issue. So now they're trying to catch up - but seemingly still haven't got there, in terms of the fundamental architecture of the OS, as the never-ending stream of bug patches attests. The sad thing is that how to provide good security (not perfect, but much, much better than what we have) was worked out a long time ago, and Intel hired Roger Schell to add the necessary hardware underpinnings when they did the 386: http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/133439/1/oh405rrs.pdf Mutatis mutandis. Noel

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Norman Wilson

Random832 (a good year for randomness, that): Who says right is positive? ===== Good question. Norman Wilson Toronto ON Left-handed

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

by Norman Wilson

Clem Cole: IIRC this is part of the argument Dykstra made with the THE paper years ago, Parnas in his information hiding paper -- i.e. why microkernels and proper layering are a good idea. Keep is simple and do one thing well/protect yourself against other subsystems not being 100%. ===== Indeed. Complexity creates needless RISC, er, risk. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 7 months

OT: critical Intel design flaw

by Andy Kosela

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/ Including here as it concerns Unix kernel and leaking memory from kernel space to userland. This is big -- it appears this is a fundamental Intel bug that exists in all x86_64 CPUs. It will be interesting to watch the ramifications and impact of this on the industry as a whole. --Andy

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Doug McIlroy

> A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to > when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT boxes > in here in Australia. At installation time, we had to express the time > offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief that > Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it saved an > entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required). But east postive is an artifact of north up. I remember Australian souvenir shops selling maps on "MacQuarrie's corrective projection", in which south is up. In fact this orientation was not uncommon in Europe between medieval maps that really were oriented, with east up, and later convention that put north up and shoved Australia down under. Surely an Aussie would prefer south up and west positive! Doug

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Clem Cole

On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 7:15 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > > A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to > when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT boxes > in here in Australia. At installation time, we had to express the time > offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief that > Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it saved an > entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required). Dave I'm not so sure it's about being perceived as forward or backwards - its just shallow, provincial and often lazy because the program did not really knowing any better. The problem is too many American', (particularly younger ones that experience our 'excellent' educational system), have often never travelled that much and experiences other places, cultures or social norms. I admit this is extreme example, but about 8 years ago, my daughter had a friend, who was approx 16 at the time, that we took to the big city (Boston) to play in a orchestra concert at Symphony Hall when they both were named 'All State' for the instruments. I don't remember why said friends family did not/could not come - but it made sense and we said we would take her with us. On the drive in-town, we were talking with her and I discovered that she had never gone to Boston before ... ever -- she was excited to see it (we live less than 1hr North mind you. Note quite the boon-docks). She had not gone to a 'Bo Sox' game or anything. Never went to the Science Museum, etc. She grew up in her town (mind you happy) and using TV as her window to world. Which brings me to >>my complaint<<. We, as American's, project so much about 'us' via TV. The said truth is most Americans are not like what they see on TV [e.g. Rice-A-Roni is made up!!, Benihana's is an American invention, and "the big yellow school bus" is dirty/noisy and usually without seat belts]. Sadly, many Americans do not know any better - queue the famous quote about never under-estimating the taste of the American public. But think about what folks outside the US see and think? Many of my European friends in particular all want to visit NYC. [I tell them all, visit Boston or Philadelphia first if you can. Those cities are much more representative of America then LA, NYC or Dallas; if for no other reason they are more 'European' in feel]. When I run into things like what you just described (and I seem to run into then most often with MicroSoft based tools), I think to myself, it must have been a cold day in Redmond, WA and some programmer did not want to make an effort to do make her/his solution really general ;-) Clem FWIW: Not only did we take my kids all over the world as children, we brought the world to them by sponsoring kids from all sorts of countries. But I fear, my wife and I are less the norm then I would wish. ᐧ ᐧ

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > What timezone did you say you were in again? Ah; didn't realize you wanted the exact time, not just a date! :-) Well, according to this: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/museum/ddn-news/ddn-news.n19.1 it was _planned_ to happen at "00:01 (EST) 1 Jan 1983". Whether it did happen at that moment, or if in reality there was some variance, I don't know (IIRC, I was off sailing in the Caribbean when it actually happened :-). Noel

7 years, 7 months

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TUHS