TUHS

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31 participants
6541 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

by Pat Barron

The paper I am thinking of (gee, I wish I could remember any other details about it...) was *very* detailed and specific, and was hardware-specific to either the PDP-11 or VAX. It would not at all be applicable to Linux or any kind of modern OS. I am wondering if it is something in the Leffler et al book, I'll have to go back and review that. I'll have to find my copy of it first... --Pat.

6 years

The Great NBN Out(r)age

by Dave Horsfall

A few bods have asked to see this, so... Actually, "extracted" would be better description than "redacted", but it's too late now; I could rename it and put in a CGI-redirect, but I'm too busy at the moment. ----- A redacted copy of my complaint to T$. www.horsfall.org/Telstra-comp-redact.rtf (yes, RTF; it was written on a Mac). Utterly inexcusable... Please share etc :-) -- Dave

6 years

4.1c bsd ptrace man entry

by Doug McIlroy

Ptrace was short-lived at Research, appearing in 6th through 8th editions. /proc was introduced in the 8th. Norman axed it in the 9th. Norman wrote: nobody wanted to update adb and sdb, which were big messes inside. So I did ... Once I'd done that and shipped the new adb and sdb binaries to all our machines, I removed the ptrace call from the kernel. doug

6 years

Re: [TUHS] 4.1c bsd ptrace man entry ("ptrace is unique and arcane")

by Kirk McKusick

> From: ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> > To: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> > Subject: [TUHS] 4.1c bsd ptrace man entry ("ptrace is unique and > arcane") > Message-ID: > <CAP6exYJshbA5HxOJ_iM21Cs0Y4vGfLuFigXxh4WTeqbZreY8UA(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > I always wondered who wrote this, anyone know? I have my suspicions but ... > > ".SH BUGS > .I Ptrace > is unique and arcane; it should be replaced with a special file which > can be opened and read and written. The control functions could then > be implemented with > .IR ioctl (2) > calls on this file. This would be simpler to understand and have much > higher performance." > > it's interesting in the light of the later plan 9 proc interface. > > ron The manual pages were not yet under SCCS, so the best time gap that I can give you is that the above text was added between the release of 3BSD (Nov 1979) and 4.0BSD (Nov 1980). Most likely it was Bill Joy that made that change. Kirk McKusick

6 years

4.1c bsd ptrace man entry ("ptrace is unique and arcane")

by ron minnich

I always wondered who wrote this, anyone know? I have my suspicions but ... ".SH BUGS .I Ptrace is unique and arcane; it should be replaced with a special file which can be opened and read and written. The control functions could then be implemented with .IR ioctl (2) calls on this file. This would be simpler to understand and have much higher performance." it's interesting in the light of the later plan 9 proc interface. ron

6 years

OT: Need help getting old 9 track tapes read

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. Scott Lee, who worked with me on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subystem for Pr1me Computers, recently unearthed two tapes with some version of that software. These may be the only copies extant anywhere. He says: | I was cleaning out the basement of my house. They're 35 years old, but | they've never been left in the heat or anything. I opened one of them | up and checked the tape and it's not self-sticky or anything. The odds | that they're readable is slim, because old 9-track bits tended to bleed | through each other. You were supposed to spin through the tape every | couple of years to make them last longer. That's obviously not happened. There was discussion here a while back about services that will recover such tapes and so on. But I didn't save any of that information. If you have information, PLEASE send it to me so that I can relay it to Scott. Dennis Boone & Bill Gunshannon (are you on this list?) - I may ask you to contribute $$ towards this once I know more. Thanks! Arnold

6 years

Re: [TUHS] CMU Mach sources?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Andrew Warkentin > Mach and the other kernels influenced by it basically destroyed the > reputation of microkernels ... a simple read() of a disk file, which is > a single kernel call on a monolithic kernel and usually two context > switches on QNX, takes at least 8 context switches - client->VFS->disk > FS->partition driver->disk driver and back again). Hammer-nail syndrome. When the only tool you have for creating separate subsystems is processes, you wind up with a lot of processes. Who'd a thunk it. A system with a segmented memory which allows subroutine calls from one subsystem to another will have a lot less overhead. It does take hardware support to be really efficient, though. The x86 processors had that support, until Intel dropped it from the latest ones because nobody used it. Excuse me while I go bang my head on a very hard wall until the pain stops. Noel

6 years

Any oldtimers remember anything about the KS11 on the -11/20?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

This is an appeal to the few really-old-timers (i.e. who used the PDP-11/20 version of Unix) on the list to see if they remember _anything_ of the KS11 memory mapping unit used on that machine. Next to nothing is known of the KS11. Dennis' page "Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix": https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/odd.html has a story involving it (at the end), and that is all I've ever been able to find out about it. I don't expect documentation, but I am hoping someone will remember _basically_ what it did. My original guess as to its functionality, from that page, was that it's not part of the CPU, but a UNIBUS device, placed between the UNIBUS leaving the CPU, and the rest of the the bus, which perhaps mapped addresses around (and definitely limited user access to I/O page addresses). It might also have mapped part of the UNIBUS space which the -11/20 CPU _can_ see (i.e. in the 0-56KB range) up to UNIBUS higher addresses, where 'extra' memory is configured - but that's just a guess; but it is an example of the kind of info I'd like to find out about it - just the briefest of high-level descriptions would be an improvement on what little we have now! On re-reading that page, I see it apparently supported some sort of user/kernel mode distinction, which might have require a tie-in to the CPU. (But not necessarily; if there was a flop in the KS11 which stored the 'CPU mode' bit, it might be automatically cleared on all interrupts. Not sure how it would have handled traps, though.) Even extremely dim memories will be an improvement on the blank canvas we have now! Noel

6 years

Re: [TUHS] Any oldtimers remember anything about the KS11 on the 11/20?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rudi Blom > Probably already known, but to be sure Interesting options: MX11 - > Memory Extension Option: this enabled the usage of 128 KW memory (18-bit > addressing range) Actually, I didn't know of that; something else to track down. Wrong list for that, though. Noel

6 years

Any oldtimers remember anything about the KS11 on the 11/20?

by Rudi Blom

Probably already known, but to be sure Interesting options: MX11 - Memory Extension Option: this enabled the usage of 128 KW memory (18-bit addressing range); KS11: this option provided hardware memory protection, which the plain /20 lacked. Both options were developed by the Digital CSS (Computer Special Systems). http://hampage.hu/pdp-11/1120.html PS the page listed below has a very nice picture of the 'two fathers of UNIX" working on a PDP-11/20 http://hampage.hu/unix/unix1.html

6 years

Re: [TUHS] UNIX 50th at USENIX ATC

by Norman Wilson

Kevin Bowling: The conference looks supremely uninteresting outside one WAFL talk to me. ==== That is, of course, a matter of opinion. Just from skimming titles I see about two dozen talks of at least some interest to me in the ATC program. And that's just ATC; I'm planning to attend the Hot* workshops on Monday and Tuesday as well. Of course I won't attend every one of those talks--some coincide in time, some I'll miss because I get stuck in the hallway track. And some will prove less interesting in practice, though others that don't seem all that interesting in the program will likely prove much better in person. I've been attending USENIX ATC for decades, and although some conferences have been meatier than others, I've never ended up feeling the trip was a waste of time. Perhaps us old farts just aren't as discriminating as you youngsters. That said, I think Kevin's question Is there a way to participate [on the UNIX50 event] without attending Usenix ATC? is a good one. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 1 month

RIP Bud Lawson

by Doug McIlroy

Bud Lawson, long an expat living in Sweden, died yesterday. Not a Unix person, he was, however, the originator of a characteristic Unix programmer's idiom. Using an idea adapted from Ken Knowlton, Bud invented the pointer- chasing arrow operator that Dennis Ritchie adopted for C. I played matchmaker. When Bud first proposed the "based storage" (pointer) facility for PL/I, he used the well-established field(pointer) notation. I introduced him to the pointer-chasing notation Knowlton devised for L6. Knowlton, however, had no operator because he had only single-letter identifiers. What we now write as a->b->c, Knowlton wrote as abc. Appreciating the absence of parentheses, Bud came up with the wonderfully intuitive pointer->field notation. Doug

6 years, 1 month

MtXinu floppy set for Mach386

by Jason Stevens

I came across Scott Taylor’s site which mentions his adventure with MtXinu (https://www.retrosys.net/) I had asked a few years ago (February 2017?) about locating a set Of this to no avail, but thanks to Scott the binary set is now available. ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/operatingsystems/Mach2.5/MtXinu-binary-dist/floppies/M… There is some additional documentation to be found here. ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/operatingsystems/Mach2.5/MtXinu-binary-dist/docs The floppy drive like 386BSD is super weak and I had no luck with Qemu. VMWare worked fine to install. The VMDK will run on Qemu as low as 0.90 just fine. I haven’t tried the networking at all, so I don’t know about adapters/protocol support. I’ve been using a serial line to uuencode stuff in & out but it’s been stable.

6 years, 1 month

Celebration of Internet History with their UNIX at 50 Event

by Clem Cole

We are all thrilled and thankful for the generosity of SDF and LCM+L by sponsoring and providing a celebration of Internet History with their UNIX at 50 Event for the USENIX ATC Attendees. We understand not all of you can participate in the conference, but would still like to be part of the celebration. Our hosts have graciously opened the event to the community at large, as I said in my previous message, it should be an evening of computer people being able to be around and discussing computer history. However, if you are not planning to attend the conference but wish to attend the evening's event, we wish that you would at least consider joining one or more of the organizations to help support them all in the future. All three organizations are members supported and need all our help and contributions to function and bring their services to everyone today and hopefully 50 years from now. Membership details for each can be found at Join SDF <https://sdf.org/join>, LCM+L Memberships <https://livingcomputers.org/Join/Memberships.aspx>, and USENIX Association Memberships <https://www.usenix.org/membership-services> ᐧ

6 years, 1 month

Question about finding curses to build on v7

by Adam Thornton

I've been playing with simh recently, and there is a nonzero chance I will soon be acquiring a PDP/11-70. I realize I could run 2.11BSD on it, and as long as I stay away from a networking stack, I probably won't see too many coremap overflow errors. But I think I'd really rather run V7. However, there's one thing that makes it a less than ideal environment for me. I grew up after cursor-addressable terminals were a thing, and, even if I can eventually make "ed" do what I want, it isn't much fun. I've been an Emacs user since 1988 and my muscle memory isn't going to change soon (and failing being able to find and build Gosmacs or an early GNU Emacs, yes, I can get by in vi more easily than in ed; all those years playing Nethack poorly were good for something). So...where can I find a curses implementation (and really all I need in the termcap or terminfo layer is ANSI or VTxxx) that can be coerced into building on V7 pretty easily? Also, I think folks here might enjoy reading a little personal travelogue of some early Unix systems from my perspective (which is to say, a happy user of Unix for 30+ years but hardly ever near core development (I did do the DIAG 250 block driver for the zSeries port of OpenSolaris; then IBM pushed a little too hard on the price and Sun sold itself to (ugh) Oracle instead; the world would have been more fun if IBM had bought the company like we were betting on)). That's at https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14340.html ; that in turn references a review I did about a year ago of The Unix Hater's Handbook, at https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html . Adam

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Montgomery's emacs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Mary Ann Horton > Warren's emacs would have been part of the Bell Labs 'exptools' > (experimental tools) package ... it's possible that's what you have. I don't think so; Warren had been a grad student in our group, and we got it on that basis. I'm pretty sure we didn't have termcap or any of that stuff. Noel

6 years, 1 month

Montgomery's emacs

by Pat Barron

I'm reminded since Erik brought this up... Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere... I used it long ago on V7m, and I had it on my AT&T 7300 (where it was available as a binary package). It's the first emacs I ever used. I don't recall where we got it for the PDP-11. On our system, we had it permission-restricted so only certain trusted users could use it - basically, people who could be trusted not to be in it all the time, and not to use it while the system was busy. We had an 11/40 with 128K, and 2 or 3 people trying to use Mongomery emacs would basically crush the system... In the absence of that, I've always found JOVE to be the next best thing, as far as being lightweight and sufficently emacs-like. I actually install it on almost all of my Linux systems. Did JOVE ever run on V7? --Pat.

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Montgomery's emacs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Pat Barron > Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere... I've got a copy on the dump of the MIT PWB system. I'm actually supposed to resurrect it for someone, IIRC, (the MIT system was .. idiosyncratic, so it'll take a bit of tweaking), but haven't gotten to it yet. Does anyone else have the source, or is mine the only one left? Noel

6 years, 1 month

UNIX 50th at USENIX ATC

by Clem Cole

Sorry for the long delay on this notice, but until this weekend there were still a few things to iron out before I made a broad announcement. First, I want to thank the wonderful folks at the Living Computers Museum and Labs <https://livingcomputers.org/> who are set up to host an event at their museum for our members on the evening of July 10, which is during the week of USENIX ATC. To quote an email from their Curator, Aaron Alcorn: "*an easy-going members events with USENIX attendees as their special invited guests.*" As Aaron suggested, this event will just be computer people and computers, which seems fitting and a good match ;-) Our desire is to have as many of the old and new 'UNIX folks' at this event as possible and we can share stories of how our community got to where we are. Please spread the word, since we want to get as many people coming and sharing as we can. BTW: The Museum is hoping to have their refurbished PDP-7 running by that date. A couple of us on this list will be bringing a kit of SW in the hopes that we can boot Unix V0!! Second, USENIX BOD will provide us a room at ATC all week long to set up equipment and show off some things our community has done in the past. I have been in contact with some of you offline and will continue to do so. There should be some smaller historical systems that people will bring (plus connections to the LCM's systems via the Internet, of course) and there will be some RPi's running different emulators. I do hope that both the event and the computer room should be fun for all. Thanks, Clem Cole

6 years, 1 month

PAC (Perceptual audio coder)

by aksr

Hi, Have anyone tried to get this open-sourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_audio_coder Regards, Alexander

6 years, 1 month

Scratch files in csh

by Edouard Klein

Hi all, I saw this on https://old.reddit.com/r/unix : http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/no-itch-to-scratch.html It's about (the lack of) scratch files in csh. Maybe somebody here know what happened to the feature ? Cheers, Edouard.

6 years, 1 month

Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

by David

I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. So, anyone ever use this feature? David

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem quotas. At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view: Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from getting their work done. Thus, in my 41 years of systems management at Utah, we have not had a SINGLE SYSTEM with user disk quotas enabled. We have run PDP-11s with RT-11, RSX, and RSTS, PDP-10s with TOPS-20, VAXes with VMS and BSD Unix, an Ardent Titan, a Stardent, a Cray EL/94, and hundreds of Unix workstations from Apple, DEC, Dell, HP, IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun with numerous CPU families (Alpha, Arm, MC68K, SPARC, MIPS, NS 88000, PowerPC, x86, x86_64, and maybe others that I forget at the moment). For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months, on GNU/Linux CentOS 7. Each ZFS dataset gets its space from a large shared pool of disks, and each dataset has a quota: thus, space CAN fill up in a given dataset, so that some users might experience a disk-full situation. In practice, that rarely happens, because a cron job runs every 20 minutes, looking for datasets that are nearly full, and giving them a few extra GB if needed. Affected users in a average of 10 minutes or so will no longer see disk-full problems. If we see serious imbalance in the sizes of previously similar-sized datasets, we manually move directory trees between datasets to achieve a reasonable balance, and reset the dataset quotas. We make nightly ZFS snapshots (hourly for user home directories), and send the nightlies to an off-campus server in a large datacenter, and we write nightly filesystem backs to a tape robot. The tape technology generations have evolved through 9-track, QIC, 4mm DAT, 8mm DAT, DLT, LTO-4, LTO-6, and perhaps soon, LTO-8. Our main fileserver talks through a live SAN FibreChannel mirror to independent storage arrays in two different buildings. Thus, we always have two live copies of all data, and third far-away live copy that is no more than 24 hours old. Yes, we do see runaway output files from time to time, and an occasional student (among currently more than 17,000 accounts) who uses an unreasonable amount of space. In such cases, we deal with the job, or user, involved, and get space freed up; other users remain largely remain unaware of the temporary space crisis. The result of our no-quotas policy is that few of our users have ever seen a disk-full condition; they just get on with their work, as they, and we, expect them to do. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 1 month

anyone used the fair share shedular?

by Steve Simon

i used the fair share schedular whilst a sysadmin of a small cray at UNSW. being an expensive machine the various departments who paid for it wanted, well, their fair share. in a different job i had a cron job that restricted Sybase backend engines to a subset of the cpus on an big SGI box during peak hours, at night sybase had free reign of all cpus. anyone did anything similar? -Steve

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: KatolaZ > I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely > remember when it was increased to 10MB :) Light your cigar with disk blocks! When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, a PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an RS11 drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce off the floor, reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a total capacity of 512KB (1024 512-byte blocks). IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-) Noel

6 years, 1 month

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TUHS