1 Jan
2023
1 Jan
'23
2:05 p.m.
On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 09:02:38PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
"the tuned-up system, with the addition of Robert Elz's auto
configuration code, was released as 4.1BSD in June, 1981"
McKusick, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
"This update to the fourth distribution of November 1980 provides
support for the VAX 11/750 and for the full interconnect architecture of
the VAX 11/780. Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne
contributed greatly to this distribution especially in the boot-time
system configuration code"
http://bitsavers.org/bits/UCB_CSRG/4.1_BSD_19810710.zip
4.4 discussed in Torek's
Device Configuration in 4.4BSD
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/kernel/config-torek.ps
https://www.netbsd.org/~mrg/config-torek-fixed.pdf
which references:
A New Framework for Device Support in Berkeley Unix
from Proceedings of the UKUUG, London, Summer 1990.
not online, though Chris sent Warner a copy in 2021
https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2021-April/023756.html
I would also like to read it. Perhaps it could be added to the archive?
On 31 Dec 2022, at 15:59, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 1:26 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
That is interesting. Are you referring to this:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.1cBSD/a/sys/conf
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.1cBSD/usr/man/man8/config.8
[snip]
It would seem that the next step for Unix in the area of boot, config and device drivers
came with Sun’s OpenBoot in 1988 or so. This also appears to be the first appearance of
device trees to describe the hardware to the bios and the kernel. Moreover, it would seem
to me that OpenBoot is a spiritual ancestor of the modern Risc-V SBI specification. Maybe
by 1988 the IO hardware had become sufficiently complex and/or diverse to warrant a break
from tradition?
Was there any other notable Unix work on better organising the boot process and the
device drivers prior to OpenBoot?
I think that BSD supported autoconfiguration on the VAX well before
OpenBoot; the OpenBSD man page says it dates from 4.1 (1981) and was
revamped in 4.4.