31 Aug
2024
31 Aug
'24
6:40 a.m.
On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 9:12 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I am not that person but I hit the google pretty hard to mostly
satisfy my curiosity. I would be delighted to hear from such a
person. Sadly, I think the best guy would have been Mike Karels.
BSD/386 seems to be a first order derivative of net/2. Source:
https://ia902809.us.archive.org/25/items/BSD3861.1CD/bsd1.1-manual.pdf.
To what degree that it incorporated anything from 386bsd would
probably rely on first hand accounts.
I don't have much to go on for BSD/OS 2.x but it seems like it was
about rebasing on 4.4-lite if we look at the family tree
http://www.netbsd.org/about/history.html
Not much sourcing to go on for BSD/OS 3.x.
Luckily for BSD/OS 4.x we get some release notes:
*
https://ia600908.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22/items/bsdos-4.…
*
https://ia800900.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/21/items/bsdos-4.…
For 5.x I again don't have much to go on but we can take an indirect
approach from some FreeBSD SMPng reports where BSDi donated source
code that was not used wholesale but instead had to be reintegrated or
rewritten:
* http://www.lemis.com/grog/Daemons-advocate/unix-way-c.html
* https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix01/freenix01/full_papers/lehey/le…
And what I was initially after, a comparative report on how BSD/OS
related to others:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix99/full_papers/metz/metz.pdf
(page 6)
I would be pretty confident in saying BSD/OS is _not_ a FreeBSD
derivative but a first order derivative of net/2 that eventually wound
up looking a little bit like FreeBSD in its later years. According to
grog in (www.lemis.com/grog/Daemons-advocate/unix-way-c.html) there
was an attempt by BSDi to rebase to FreeBSD but it was abandoned.
I've found scant detail on what WindRiver did with 5.0 and 5.1 so I am
unsure, but in playing around with 5.1 it does have FreeBSD's CAM
layer but does not look like i.e. FreeBSD 5.x in a variety of material
ways.
Regards,
Kevin
From: Kevin Bowling
https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent
page on seem to suggest
it originated off Net/2 directly.
I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the
*BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten
details wrong
I myself later just tried to quickly, without much effort, work out roughly
what the relationship was between those *BSD systems, based on what other
people had written. E.g the now-'BSD/OS' page was originally at
'386/BSD',
and I seem to have worked out that it's correct name was BSD/OS and moved it
there. The BSD/386 page is probably roughly correct, since it contains a scan
of a contemporary ad for it.
(So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from 'BSD/386'.
Was there ever
actually a '386/BSD'?)
Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in, you lived
through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any errors therein. Noel