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6532 discussions

MASSCOMP MC-500 Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver

by Warner Losh

Greetings, I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J. Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says: "This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver. The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared for MASSCOMP by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D." I checked bit keepers and found nothing. I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy, etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well), but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality). As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today (like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK). Warner

6 years, 2 months

A question about ls(1)

by Anthony Martin

>From at least V2 to V6, the ls(1) command would not show directory entries whose names began with a '.' unless the -a flag was supplied. This was changed in V7: only the directory entries for "." and ".." would be skipped by default. All further versions of Research Unix retain the convention of V7 and Plan 9 ultimately made it unnecessary. However, BSD and its descendants did not follow suit. Instead, they continued behaving like V6 with an additional -A flag to emulate V7. Was the initial behavior intentional or just a matter of expediency? Who made the change and what was their motivation? Was it a reaction to the intentional hiding of what came to be known as "dot files"? Thanks, Anthony

6 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: Need help getting old 9 track tapes read

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Skeeve > If you have information, PLEASE send it to me so that I can relay it > to Scott. IMO, only one choice: Chuck Guzis (cclist(a)sydex.com) he's very active in the vintage computer community, and reads old media professionally. I've used him (to recover those backup tapes of the MIT PWB1 system), which was rather tricky (bad mold; he had to build a special tool to remove it), and I was incredibly happy. Very reasonable price too - although he may have given me a special 'collector' rate.. :-) Noel

6 years, 2 months

v8 networking and streams (was: a question about ls)

by Paul Ruizendaal

> There was a hacky implementation of TCP/IP which we didn't really use: > 4.Y BSD (I don't know the value of Y) protocol code, wrapped up to > work as stream modules* and shoehorned in, with a custom API quite > different from the BSD one. The work was done by a summer student, > Robert T. Morris, who later became rather famous for a smaller but > rather more troublesome bit of network code. Our production network > was Datakit, which was also implemented as stream devices and modules > (it was the network whose use inspired the stream design, in fact). I’d love to hear more about that. So far, the only information I have found about (lowercase) streams and networking - as used at the labs - is the v8 source code and a 1984 message from dmr on a mailing list. The (lower level) v8 networking concepts appear to carry through to v10 and Plan9. It is my impression that the unix/datakit tradition essentially views a network connection as a special kind of device, whereas the unix/arpanet tradition essentially views a network connection as a special kind of pipe. In both cases this would seem to have been an accidental choice driven by convenience in early implementations (respectively the Spider network drivers and NCP Unix from the UoI). However, that is an impression formed 35+ years after the fact and the contemporary view may have been very different. Paul

6 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] A question about ls(1)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Norman Wilson > Quite a while ago, someone asked how multiplexing was handled in the > stream world. I meant to write a reply but never did. In a sentence, > by a paired device driver and stream module. If someone wants more > details I'll be glad to write more about that. Please. Thanks! Noel

6 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] A question about ls(1)

by norman＠oclsc.org

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 09:38:27AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: But I find this interesting, since the 8th edition was based on BSD 4.1c I thought.... `Based on' is an overstatement, except in the kernel. The system described in the 8th Edition manual (as noted in the past, there was only sort of a real V8 release) had a kernel that started as 4.1x BSD. I'm not sure of the value of x. It had the Joy/Babaolgu paging code and the complicated changes to signals, and a lot of the gratuitous asms, but not a trace of the BSD networking API. Neither was the BSD FFS present. Local additions included Dennis's original stream implementation, which completely replaced the old tty code and rewrote the drivers for serial-port devices. The tty driver (responsible for cooked mode, interrupt and quit signals, and the like) was a stream module. The BSD-style `new tty line discipline' was a separate module, for the few people who couldn't live without csh. Tom Killian's original version of /proc and Peter Weinberger's original network file system (neta) client were there. These were accessed through a file system switch, also Peter's work. Instead of FFS, Peter made a simple speedup to the V7 file system: adding 64 to the minor device number meant the file system used 4KiB blocks. The unused space at the end of the now-4KiB superblock was a bitmap of free blocks, allowing somewhat-smarter block allocation. There was a hacky implementation of TCP/IP which we didn't really use: 4.Y BSD (I don't know the value of Y) protocol code, wrapped up to work as stream modules* and shoehorned in, with a custom API quite different from the BSD one. The work was done by a summer student, Robert T. Morris, who later became rather famous for a smaller but rather more troublesome bit of network code. Our production network was Datakit, which was also implemented as stream devices and modules (it was the network whose use inspired the stream design, in fact). [* Quite a while ago, someone asked how multiplexing was handled in the stream world. I meant to write a reply but never did. In a sentence, by a paired device driver and stream module. If someone wants more details I'll be glad to write more about that.] That's just the kernel, though. The user-mode world was largely descended from V7 rather than from BSD. Most people used sh, which had been augmented a bit by Rob Pike (perhaps et al) to add functions and a simple external history mechanism (Tom Duff's idea, I think). wc had no uucp-dependent flags, and cat had no flags at all. ls did sniff at whether standard output was a tty and put things in columns. Things mutated further as time went on, further diverging from and discarding aspects of the BSD origin. (I can take credit or blame for a lot of that, though not all.) But that happened later, and is reflected in the 9th and especially 10th editions of the manual. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 2 months

Historical events/conferences in 2019?

by reed＠reedmedia.net

I never heard about any history/anniversary track at Usenix in summer in Renton, Washington. It will be an unofficial side event if anything. I have no details. I heard about the two Vintage Computer Festival events but probably too soon for me. Does anyone know of any other events with a focus on the Unix anniversary?

6 years, 2 months

[ANN] Utilities for 4.3BSD: set post-Y2K date, etc.

by Dario Niedermann

Hi! I am releasing 'datekit-1.0' for 4.3BSD-Reno: a couple of free utilities for setting post-Y2K date and time, plus timezone and DST. Here's a brief outtake from the README, detailing the archive contents: [...] date.c the 4.3BSD-Quasijarus `date' program, modified to optionally accept 4-digit years, and default to post-2000 for 2-digit years [...] It can also: + set Daylight Saving Time: option -d [...] + set a time zone: -t minutes-West-of-Greenwich. Negative values for East. rdate.c the `rdate' program ported from OpenBSD 2.0: it synchronizes your machine's clock to that of a remote host, by connecting to the host's "time" service. [...] Man page for `rdate' and a Makefile for both programs are provided. All of the above made and tested in 4.3BSD-Reno, on an emulated VAX-11/780. Archive for download at: <gopher://darioniedermann.it/1/Computing/sw/datekit> -- Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at: gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/

6 years, 2 months

New project to recreate the B compiler for the PDP-11

by Robert Swierczek

I just started a project to recreate the B compiler for the PDP-11 as authentically as possible, given the few fragments that remain and some educated guesswork. It should be fun (for various definitions of fun). Here is the repository https://github.com/rswier/pdp11-B I have borrowed some tools from Warren's https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72 I have made a good start at reverse engineering the B run time library in /usr/lib/libb.a. I have tried to make the source match the same style as the earliest C library found on the last1120c-bits tape. The remaining functions in libb.a include printf and printn which appear to be written in B. This should provide more clues needed to create the compiler. I am also tackling the dis-assembly of the threaded code interpreter /usr/lib/bilib.a (which at the moment is a big mess on my hard-drive) Later steps will include creating the B compiler itself by carefully pruning down the last1120c C compiler. The fun here will be to boot-strap the B compiler without help from any existing modern compilers. I think TMG will come into play to make that happen. All are welcome to contribute! Rob

6 years, 2 months

VCF East in May

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, just to let you know that VCF East in May has some Unix anniversary events. bwk will be interviewing ken as one of the keynotes. Wish I could be there! Details at: http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/ Cheers, Warren

6 years, 2 months

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