8 Feb
2017
8 Feb
'17
6:29 p.m.
On 2017-02-08 12:21, Nick Downing wrote:
Yes, NetBSD and 386BSD are interesting. They could
well form a good
basis for a minimal but fully functional OS for a modern platform. One
reservation I have though, is as follows: When 386BSD and its
derivatives like OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD came out, Unix was still
encumbered and thus they had to be based on 4.4BSD Lite (not even
NET/2 was safe). Nobody made an unencumbered version of say 4.3BSD or
even NET/2, even though it was theoretically possible, by examining
what had to be taken out/added to produce 4.4BSD Lite.
The 386BSD porting started on 4.3BSD-Reno with patches being fed back
to BSD. Stuff was being thrown out of BSD at the same time for the Net
releases. Must have been difficult. First release was Net/2 + missing
bits and pieces. ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/4.3bsd/i386-jolitz/diffs/
Note that Jolitz was never sued for using Net/2 ;)
NetBSD and FreeBSD started as 386bsd 0.1 + patchkits. To "unencumber"
NetBSD the 0.8 release was scrubbed from the net and a pile of files
in cvs were replaced with the text "revision x.y intentionally removed"
and rewritten or taken from a cleaner BSD release.
List of files at http://oldbsd.org/removed.txt
FreeBSD claiming to be 4.4BSD-Lite based is, I think, a legal fiction.
I could be wrong, but it is far more likely they did it the same way
as NetBSD after the FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 release. I don't believe they
restarted with a clean 4.4BSD-Lite tape, but the FreeBSD handbook
claims that is what they did for the 2.0 release.