22 Feb
2016
22 Feb
'16
3:05 a.m.
On 2/21/16 12:59 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
Will Senn asked
Thanks Clem. I know that in theory, this should be super
straightforward, but it seems that theory and reality are uncomfortable
with each other around me and this question. I've tried maybe 7 dozen
different approaches to getting 1bsd.tar.gz files to be accessible to v6
with more than a handful of files at a time. The vast majority of these
methods were flawed in their conception, but some "should have worked"
by all accounts, and yet, no joy (pun intended). I can use the paper
tape punch method or others to copy one file at a time, but that's
tedious. All of the other methods folks have suggested, I've tried, but
frustratingly, it just doesn't seem possible to perform the "back in the
day" install of 1bsd on v6:
Berkeley UNIX Software Tape
Jan 16, 1978 TP 800BPI
To extract contents do:
tp xm ./setup; sh setup; tp xm
See accompanying document
Second label on the tape:
The contents of this tape are
distributed to UNIX licensees
only, subject to the software
agreement you have with Western
Electric and an agreement with
the University of California.
For example, it seems like using tar2mt on the gunzipped tarball and
attaching to tm0 should work, but when running tp xm on it, it fails
(something about directory checksum). I know the tarball is good, not so
sure about the mt image (tried it with default blocksize and 512 as well).
In the absence of positive confirmation of someone else's successful
experience installing 1bsd, I backburner this problem every so often and
carry on with my other investigations. When someone suggests something
new, or I think of some new angle, I fire up the sim and try installing
again. Hence, my occasional queries that seem to be retreads.
Now that I have more experience with the SimH simulator, PDP-11
architecture/programming, and success at moving files around DEC OS'es,
I feel oh so close to a breakthrough on this one sticky problem :).
Hence my latest interest in the file system. I figure if I can
understand the format I may be able to check the conversion of the
tarball to a v6 consumable filesystem and determine why it's not working.
Why, oh why, didn't someone save a tape image, rather than a tarball,
given that tar on v6 was so hokey?!
Thanks,
Will
Supposing I created a byte faithful
representation of a V6 filesystem
on my mac, would I then be able to load the file
in simh as an
RK05 and
mount and access its files and directories from a
V6 instance?
Not 100% sure how to parse this... but that is exactly how simh (and
Ersatz11)
work.
You have a UNIX file on your mac and at the simh interactive command
system, you "attach" it as the data for the simulated RK05.
But it's a manual process to do the attachment AND more importantly,
since Mac OSx just sees it as bits, as a minimum you need to write
tools to push/pull V6 "files" from the image. This is the same as the
"DOS Tools" trick you see in a lot of UNIX systems that know how to
"grok" DOS/FAT file system images. You would need to do the same
thing. If you poke around the Warren's TUHS archives, you might find
some of this already there.
What many of us do it attach a file as a virtual disk but instead of
using a UNIX file system format, use it is a tape image. Then use
tar/cpio or whatever if you already a tool on both sides that can
interpret the bits. Hence, the v6tar discussion of a few weeks ago.
The UNIX ar(1) format is sometimes used also, since it was common.
cpio -c also works, but that was not on the research systems. My
old room mate, Tom Quarles, wrote a really good ANSI tape
reader/writer for BSD UNIX. That should back port to v6 with a little
work, particularly if you the "typesetter C" compiler for V6 which
supported enough of the V7 C. The advantage of the ANSI tape format
is that its common with the DEC systems as well as UNIX.
That said, you can be smarter and more automatic. As Noel says
Ersatz11 supports a virtual shared disk (the same way VMware and
Parallels) do. Writing such a device for simh would be cool and in
fact useful for many different emulators. Warning there are a lot of
dragons hidden with such a shared FS. At is definitely doable, but
is going to take some work.
The other thing you could do that might be a little less work, but
would be Mac specific, is Mac OSX has the FUSE file system emulation
that stuff that Google released. If hacked up support for the old
Unix FS, you could mount the V6 "disk" image as Mac OSx disk and see
the bits with normal tools. I've thought about doing this but I have
never had the time. If I ever became a serious user of the simh, I
would probably want something more like this.
Clem