22 Dec
2022
22 Dec
'22
4:55 p.m.
Adam Thorton wrote:
I mean all I really want for Christmas is a 64-bit v7
with TCP/IP support, a screen editor, and SMP support.
The third one is a solved problem. The second one would not be that hard to adapt, say,
uIP 0.9, to v7. That first one would require some work with C type sizes, but getting
larger is easier than the reverse. It's that last one.
Having said that...maybe what I really want is 64-bit 4.3 BSD?
I mean, just a Unix, without all the cruft of a modern Linux, but which can actually take
advantage of the resources of a modern machine. I don't care about a desktop, or
even a graphical environment, I don't care about all the strange syscalls that are
there to support particular databases, I don't care much about being a virtualization
host.
Luther Johnson wrote:
I'm in the process of building a system like that
for myself, but
perhaps a little smaller - mine will be based on an embedded
microprocessor I've developed (so much work still yet to do ! at least a
year out).
Earlier this year I ported VAX System III to Risc-V, to a simple Allwinner D1 based SBC.
This is RV64GC. Just ported to the console terminal.
It turned out that porting Sys III to 64 bit was surprisingly easy, most of the kernel and
user land appears to be 64 bit clean. It helps that I am using a LLP64 compiler, though.
Apart from networking Sys III also feels surprisingly modern (for an ancient Unix) - its
should get more attention than it does. The hardest work was in porting the VAX memory
code to Risc-V page tables (and to a lesser extent, updating libc for the different FP
formats).
The code is currently in an ugly state (with debug stuff in commented-out blocks, a mix of
ansi and K&R styles, an incoherent kludgy build system, etc.) and the shame stopped me
from putting it out on gitlab until I found enough time to clean this up. As there seems
to be some interest now, I’ll put it up anyway in the next week or so. There you go Adam,
half your wish comes true.
The kernel is about 60KB and most binaries are quite close in size to the VAX
equivalents.
My next goals for it are to re-implement the Reiser demand paging (I think I have a good
enough view of how that worked, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating), and
to add TCP/IP networking, probably the BBN stack. Making it work on RV32 and exploring
early SMP work is also on my interest list.
===
David Arnold wrote:
I think xv6 does SMP? (param.h says NCPU = 8, at
least).
You’d need to add a network stack and a userland, but there are options for those …
For the above, making xv6 work on the D1 board was my first stepping stone, to proof the
tool chain and to get the basics right (hardware init, low-level I/O, etc.).
As an educational tool, I am sure that xv6 hits all the right spots, and it certainly does
SMP (the D1 is single hart, so I have not tried that myself). I like it a lot in that
context. However, as a simple Unix it is useless: from a user-land view it is less capable
than LSX. At minimum it needs fixes to make the file system less constrained.
In my view, for SMP Keith Kelleman’s work for Sys-V is probably a better place to start.