gsrc09.024 was the problem file in the NetBSD 0.9 sources. I can send you a copy to post if you are interested.

A while ago I found a dump of the 1993 tree to the original NetBSD 0.8 here, although, it kind of kills the spirit of splicing in bits of 386BSD pl32 and NetBSD 0.9 to get a booting system, but it’s been saved!

I’ll try to take a look at the broken gsrc, I’m not sure whats up with that, I did build world at one point, so I’d have to assume it was whole at one point.

I’m glad you enjoyed the whole article set, sadly at the time, the majority of the feedback I got from people was ‘why bother’, and that 0.8 is too old to care about. But I still view NetBSD 0.8 & 0.9 as a historical significance along with 1.2 with the return to the VAX!

I did my own experiment and figured out that you actually don’t have to install 386BSD or load the floppy in Bochs before getting NetBSD-0.8 to run in QEMU. Just copy NetBSD 0.8 AHA kernel (386bsd) to a FreeBSD 1.0 boot floppy (correct me if I remembered the wrong release), and it will work like a charm. Well, to put it simply, this means using FreeBSD’s boot code to load NetBSD kernel given that they both derived from 386BSD 🙂 It is NetBSD’s buggy floppy boot code that is to blame, but to debug boot code is out of the scope of my project.

For 0.9, I am unsure if the CVS checkout (netbsd-0.9-src.tar.gz) can be used instead for /usr/src, but at least a simple grep shows there is probably no “intentionally removed” file (as opposed to 0.8 where tens of files were deleted). Only gsrc09 is damaged, so just replace /usr/src/gnu directory contents with the CVS version. If anyone could find the original copies of gsrc09.024~026 (and make sure they are from the same CD-ROM; better get an ISO image), life would become a lot easier.

Keep posting cool stuff!

Its been four years so I’m not 100% sure. I think I eventually found a 0.8 distribution of netbsd without having to back port from 386 bsd

Or you’re looking for something else related to 386BSD?

I tried mailing you at jsteve()supermega… since that was where I got new comment reply from. Maybe that didn’t work?

wow that would be cool to have one way or the other. It has been a few years and I don’t recall if I made available the full list of what I changed, other than I vaguely recall it was on gunkies.

Let me know if you can share the NetBSD 0.8, so I can add it on sourceforge…. 🙂