Just to bring it full circle, after a bit of discussion it looks like what Henry is working with is the initial System V release for PDP-11/70, not some fabled PDP-11 SVR2, so the documentation I linked as well as some material on squoze.net concerning System V in SimH all apply directly. Subject adjusted accordingly.
- Matt G.
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:55 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user.
>
> ...
>
> I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks!
>
> -Henry
First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it off after the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some derivative version?
Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial release of System V which included the PDP-11/70: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setting%20Up%20The%20UNIX%20System%20%28DEC%29/
Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the system among other things: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up
While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can use those. Good luck!
Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the /usr/doc materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation actually can't be found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had to get the paper copies. I'm not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources for any of this stuff past System III, I do have it on my long-term list to eventually synthesize copies of said documents from available scans so they can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much earlier.
Thank you, this is a wonderful starting point. I often forget that sometimes
archive.org will have documentation that is not duplicated in other sources, so this is a welcome reminder. I'll read through all of this and report back.
-Henry