Message: 4
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2022 12:29:24 +0200
From: Holger Veit <hveit01(a)web.de>
Subject: [TUHS] PCS Munix kernel source
Hi all,
I have uploaded the kernel source of 32 bit PCS MUNIX 1.2 to
https://github.com/hveit01/pcs-munix.
Thank you for sharing this work, most impressive!
MUNIX was an AT&T SVR3.x implementation ...
Are you sure? Could it perhaps be SVR2? (I don’t see any STREAMS stuff that one would
expect for R3).
The interesting feature of this kernel is the
integration of the
Newcastle Connection network
One of my interests is Unix (packet) networking 1975-1985 and that includes Newcastle
Connection. I’ve so far not dived deep into this, but your work may be the trigger for
some further investigation.
My understanding so far (from reading the paper a few years ago) is that Newcastle
Connection works at the level of libc, substituting system calls like open() and exec()
with library routines that scan the path, and if it is a network path invokes user mode
routines that use remote procedure calls to give the illusion of a networked kernel. I’ve
briefly looked at the Git repo, but I do not see that structure in the code. Could you
elaborate a bit more on how Newcastle Connection operates in this kernel? Happy to
communicate off-list if it goes in too much detail.
I note that the repo Readme says that the kernel only does some basic IP networking as a
carrier, but I also see some files in the tree that seem to implement a form of tcp (and
that seem unrelated to the early Unix tcp/ip’s that I have seen so far). Or am I reading
too much into these files?
===
Re-reading the Newcastle Connection paper also brought up some citations from Bell Labs
work that seems to have been lost. There is a reference to “RIDE” which appears to be a
system similar to Newcastle Connection. The RIDE paper is from 1979 and it mentions that
RIDE is a Datakit re-implementation of earlier an earlier system that ran on Spider. Any
recollections about these things among the TUHS readership?
The other citation is for J. C. Kaufeld and D. L. Russell, "Distributed UNIX
System", in Workshop on Fundamental Issues in Distributed Computing, ACM SIGOPS and
SIGPLAN (15-17 Dec. 1980). It seems contemporaneous with the Luderer/Marshall/Chu work on
S/F-Unix. I could not find this paper so far. Here, too, any recollections about this
distributed Unix among the TUHS readership?