Good day everyone. I'm taking a bit of a break from my documentation stuff and veering back towards some embedded systems work and have the burning question on my mind this morning: Was there any coordination between different groups engaged in porting efforts at Bell regarding machine layer implementations?
In other words, was there any sort of common design of "get a stack pointer, do <XYZ> on the protection hardware, move the binary to address <ABC>, clear bss, etc." that was followed as lore when working up new machine bootstraps, or was that sort of work a bit more siloed? For instance, when working on the VAX port, was the crew more likely stepping through mch replicating things based on what the PDP-11 was doing, was the startup more derived from DEC literature, or was there no single guiding principle and each machine came up, at that level at least, in a relative vacuum, with only the machine interface to UNIX being the guiding principle?
Where I'm trying to put this sort of knowledge into use is I'm starting to spec out a kernel bootstrap for the RPi Pico and Pine64 Ox64 boards (ARM32 and RISCV64 respectively) that is not only sufficient to start a V7-ish kernel on each, but that are ultimately based on the same design, varying literally only where the hardware strictly necessitates it, but similar enough that reading the two assembly files side by side yields essentially the exact same discrete operations. What I don't know is if I'm barking up the wrong tree and it was already settled in the 70s that machines are sufficiently different enough that you can't really just set forth one abstract "machine startup" design that actually includes all those CPU-level concerns such as protection, stack config, context switching, etc. I know even today peering into sources of stuff like Linux and seL4, the "ml" for each seems to have been built by a different person/group rather than someone setting out with a CPU bootstrap design and implementing the same on each chip.
So boiled down to a one liner: Was there a guiding document/design/memoranda for the mch/ml components of UNIX in Bell, or was each one designed more "on-the-fly" as the particulars of the hardware were sorted out?
- Matt G.
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
Hello,
I received word from someone who went to Case Wester Reserve
Univsersity, and is willing to send early 1970s ephemera to someone
interested in going through it. The description is:
"I've go stuff from my course work done on our Univac 1108/ChiOS system,
program listing, cpu code cards, etc."
Any takers?
Best regards,
Lars Brinkhoff
Hello all,
I am working on restoring the 2.9BSD PUCC distribution as provided on the
CSRG CD/DVD set, hopefully as closely as possible to the original system.
I am at a point where I have a setup that boots 95% of the way to multiuser
but I have encountered some difficulties with the final few steps. I would
appreciate it if anyone who is familiar with the login procedure could
contact me off-list.
-Henry
Once again, I must dredge up this post from 1991….
From spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU Thu Apr 4 23:11:22 1991
Path: ai-lab!mintaka!mit-eddie!wuarchive!usc!apple!amdahl!walldrug!moscvax!perdue!spaf
From:
spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.announce.important,news.admin
Subject: Warning: April Fools Time again (forged messages on the loose!)
Message-ID: <
4-1-1991(a)medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 1 Apr 91 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: 1 May 91 00:00:00 GMT
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.
Lines: 25
Approved:
spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU
Xref: ai-lab news.announce.important:19 news.admin:8235
Warning: April 1 is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a USENET
tradition. On April Fools day comes a series of forged, tongue-in-cheek
messages, either from non-existent sites or using the name of a Well Known
USENET person. In general, these messages are harmless and meant as a joke,
and people who respond to these messages without thinking, either by flaming
or otherwise responding, generally end up looking rather silly when the
forgery is exposed.
So, for the few weeks, if you see a message that seems completely out
of line or is otherwise unusual, think twice before posting a followup
or responding to it; it's very likely a forgery.
There are a few ways of checking to see if a message is a forgery. These
aren't foolproof, but since most forgery posters want people to figure it
out, they will allow you to track down the vast majority of forgeries:
o Russian computers. For historic reasons most forged messages have
as part of their Path: a non-existent (we think!) russian
computer, either kremvax or moscvax. Other possibilities are
nsacyber or wobegon. Please note, however, that walldrug is a real
site and isn't a forgery.
o Posted dates. Almost invariably, the date of the posting is forged
to be April 1.
o Funky Message-ID. Subtle hints are often lodged into the
Message-Id, as that field is more or less an unparsed text string
and can contain random information. Common values include pi,
the phone number of the red phone in the white house, and the
name of the forger's parrot.
o subtle mispellings. Look for subtle misspellings of the host names
in the Path: field when a message is forged in the name of a Big
Name USENET person. This is done so that the person being forged
actually gets a chance to see the message and wonder when he
actually posted it.
Forged messages, of course, are not to be condoned. But they happen, and
it's important for people on the net not to over-react. They happen at this
time every year, and the forger generally gets their kick from watching the
novice users take the posting seriously and try to flame their tails off. If
we can keep a level head and not react to these postings, they'll taper off
rather quickly and we can return to the normal state of affairs: chaos.
Thanks for your support.
Gene Spafford, Net.God (and probably tired of seeing this message)
Good evening or whatever time of day you find yourself in. I've just finished the first tag in a git repository I've put together to track UNIX developments as documented in the manual. In preparation for this, I also created restorations of the V1 and V2 manuals in roff based on the available V3 sources. The repositories for all this can be found here:
https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiffhttps://gitlab.com/segaloco/v1manhttps://gitlab.com/segaloco/v2man
There are most certainly typos and minor discrepancies still to be found between sources and the PDF scans, but given all the cross-referencing involved I believe the manual restorations to be largely complete.
As for the mandiff repository, the commit log (which might shake up in format...) should capture relatively complete transactions of either a particular feature or comparable additions, deletions, or modifications. That said, there may be little fixes in later commits of edits that really should've been in other ones, and the toc and index accuracy at any given commit is dubious at best. However, the content of the pages themselves should be pretty well broken up in to noteworthy transactions.
If you find a problem or have a correction, feel free to send it my way or even better, open a pull request with an explanation for the change. This repository will accrete more UNIX releases as time goes on, with a first goal being getting to V6, after which the fragmentary pathways will be a little harder to reconcile to a single informative trunk. I might start branches at that point.
By the way, in this process I found that the V2 manual scanned by Dennis Ritchie [1] contains references to nroff(I) in the TOC and permuted index, but the page may not have been in his copy. Given this, just to not hang up on it, I simply dropped in the V3 page with a note about this in the BUGS section.
1 - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v2/v2man.pdf
- Matt G.
Good afternoon, folks. I was wondering if anyone is aware of/possesses a scanned copy (or paper copy ripe for scanning) of the research V4 UNIX Programmer's Manual. I've found a few rendered PDFs from the available manpage sources, but I am looking to do some comparison of original typesetting re: my restorations of various other sets of manpages. I have scans of all the other research versions I believe, just not V4. Thanks in advance!
- Matt G.
Hi,
Has anyone been successful in communicating using cu or some
other method to transfer files between two SIMS running Unix V ?
If so I would appreciate some help.
Thanks,
Ken
--
WWL 📚
