It  has always bugged me that the bsd-family-tree file got 2.8BSD  slightly wrong.

It has the relationship V6 -> 1BSD -> 2BSD -> 2.79BSD -> 2.8BSD

with V7  -> 32V -> 3BSD ... -> 4.1BSD -> 2.8BSD

Now, as far as it goes, that's not terrible. But it's missing something.

First, there was no V6 code in 1BSD or 2BSD through 2.79BSD. It was for V6 at first then for both V6 and V7, but w/o V7 code. There weren't even patches for V6 or new drivers on the early 1BSD and 2BSDs. However, starting with 2.8BSD, there's a V7 kernel. Or should I say a heavily patched V7 kernel with a ton of #ifdefs for all the fixes and enhancements collected by Berkeley and a few minor build system tweaks.

Also, the code from 4.1BSD that's in 2.8 is rather minimal from what I can tell with my analysis so far, except indirectly in some of the patches to the V7 kernel appear to also be in 4.1BSD. The biggest thing that's in 2.8BSD from 4.1BSD is the job control (confined to its own directory with big warnings that basically say you'll need to update the code and even then the system is unstable). 2.9BSD has much better 4.xBSD integration, but 2.8 was quite early days for rejoining the two lines. 4.1BSD didn't have many berkeley rewrites of userland code, and the 2.8 tape has only a few of them (eg ls). So although it's not as complete as one would hope, there was a decent amount of code from 4.1BSD flowing into 2.8BSD.

Now, my request. I've created a code review for FreeBSD to fix this.  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D30883 is the review. We use phabricator in the FreeBSD project. Anybody can view this, but if you don't want to create an account, please send me email with a comment about the change and/or the commit message. It just adds an arc from V7 to 2.8BSD.

Thanks for any time and/or insight you might have here. I'm judging the above entirely on the archived code rather than any historical knowledge...

Warner