Re: [TUHS] 386BSD released

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 3:08 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: Absolutely -- I believe it was Rob's undergrad project at Brown that he brought to BBN. The first use, if I saw, was the 'portable IP/TCP' stack BBN did for HP/3000 and a couple of other systems. That code seems to have been lost. I have asked about it on the Internet history mailing list. I had a copy of it one time, but sadly I don't think I still do. IIRC The original PDP-11 IP implementation which ran on a couple of dedicated systems, whose names/function I frankly do not remember) was also based on a version of this code. I think it ran something like RT-11 or DOS-11 and then started the IP code -- basically RTR style today. Later it morphed into Rob's Vax BSD 4.1 specific stack, which we ran at UCB on a couple of the systems using 3M Xerox board. This latest until 4.1A and Joy's rewrite and I want to say we switched in Interlan 10M boards then. We have a couple of the 3Com boards, but because of the lack of buffering, they were a bear to use and stopped as soon as we got the Interlan one. Anyway, all of these IP/TCP stacks used Rob's mbuf code. Which was a blessing and a curse. By writing his own, he avoids huge changes/integration into the memory system, but it also helped to make BSD such a mess under the covers because there were so many private memory managers between the network, the I/O systems etc... As discussed previously on the TUHS list, the one thing Risner really did well had a uniform memory design. Later BSD's moved to Mach and tried to clean this up a little, but the network code was by then so screwed into Rob's mbuf scheme, it stayed around a long time. Werner -- what is the state of this these days in FreeBSD is it still there? Well, ask Rob :-) I've lost track of him since Stellar, and I think he I heard he left high tech but frankly don't know. Clem ᐧ