[TUHS] Re: PCS kernel sources

On 1/17/24 10:20, Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote: I should have attached the README that Holger provided. It's below! Cheers, Warren This is part 1 of the reverse engineered sources of the PCS Cadmus MUNIX-1.2 kernel (32bit) which can be found on the IS0371 tapes (check FTP server of Computermuseum Stuttgart, Germany, contact Klemens Krause). PCS was a German systems vendor in the 80s, located in Munich, hence "MUNIX": Munich Unix. They came up with an AT&T base Unix for a QBUS-based (!) 68010 machine (later an 68020) machine. The interesting feature of this Unix derivation was the inclusion of the so called Newcastle connection which is an early multicomputer network (similar to the later NFS) which like later SUN workstations allowed disk based as well es diskless hosts. Newcastle connection uses an own raw Ethernet protocol; it implemented basic layer 2 stuff (ARP, ICMP) but did not use TCP/IP. It is AFAIK documented here for the first time. The package includes the 32 bit 1.2 kernel from Jan, 1988, including all kernel support libraries as well as some standard libs (libc, libm, etc). There are also the rebuilt sources of the MINITOR boot monitor. To guarantee correctness of the rebuilt sources, I used the following process: - I ignore describing the unpacking and conversion of the distribution tape - many files are CPIO archives, possibly   with some uninteresting byte-sex issues. - The distribution contains a set of libraries (under /usr/src) that allow regenerating a new kernel. They are   plain AR files, without the standard .a extension. These were unpacked into the .o files of the kernel. MUNIX uses   COFF in an obscure incarnation - it uses the VAX magic, but internally contains 68K code. This is why well-known   IDA disassembler cannot handle this without some patching, but even after fixing the magic it has severe issues with   calculating .data and .bss addresses. This is why I wrote an own disassembler (pcsdis) and only used IDA for code   containing 68881 FP instructions (was to lazy to put them in - they are only used in libm.a anyway). - With the knowledge of the include headers, it was possible to transform the disassembly output back into C code.   Fortunately, the PCC-based C compiler produces rather regular code.   Looking up similar sources from elsehere, like Bitsavers and Tuhs, I could identify the original parts from AT&T code   und find the modifications that PCS made to it. The whole I/O devices library was non-AT&T code, some of it resembled   PDP11 QBUS device handlers, but most of it was hard work to compare the driver code with DEC documentation   e.g. from Bitsavers. - After having the regenerated source code, it was necessary to verify its correctness. I wrote, based on the 68K Musashi   emulator code, a syscall emulator (pcsrun) that translated the most important MUNIX syscalls (COFF loader, open, close, read, write,   fork, etc.) into corresponding OS calls, so that an original MUNIX executable like CC itself basically worked with files   from the underlying OS (in my case Windows, or Linux, resp.). It contains only the syscalls that the compiler/linker etc.   used, however, so it won't allow to try out network code. This way, I could run my C code through the original compiler   from the MUNIX distribution, and compare its output with the original binaries. This way I found numerous anachronisms   that resulted from some rather obscure type casts (which messed up register usage), as well as unused variables an even   several bugs that appear to come from sloppy adaption of original AT&T code to the platform. When trying to get the LD linker   to run, it turned out that this will work only after relaxing seg fault handling on NULL pointers - some strcmp(xxx,(char*)0)   were found in the code. - For reference, pcsdis and pcsrun are also included, however the code is ugly - they were just work horse for the purpose of   getting stuff done. Beyond references to unmodified AT&T copyrighted sources from elsewhere which were included for documentation where the code came from, all files may be freely used. Holger Veit hveit01(a)web.de 26.7.2022