I know that on the surface it may not seem like much, but considering the last update was nearly 3 years ago…
2019-02-08 Â Â
Time flies, it’s flying fast, and it’s been two years till now. The latest Chinese revision, the Fifth revision of the book:”A Heavily Commemted Linux Kernel Source Code” is now HERE, and, more importantly, the English version of the book is also given HERE. After nearly one year of translation, the English version of this book has finally been completed. Of course, there must be translation errors and tipos in the book. I hope you may point them out for me. Finally, thanks Trent Jarvi who helped me a lot, thank you friends in the Linux communities, and thank you all, and Happy Chinese Spring Festival!
Yes, that’s right the book is now available in English. And in PDF form! It’s an extensive dive into the 0.12 source, complete with diagrams, notes and annotated source code.
It’s a whopper though, 1109 pages, and weighing in at 11 MB! This is not a light read!
So retrohun is doing their blog thing on github of all things, and the latest entry, is of course Xenix tales. As mentioned in comments on this blog & other places they found another driver for Xenix TCP/IP!
Going back years ago, the tiny NIC driver support for the elderly Microsoft/SCO Xenix 386 v2 included 3COMA/B/C and SLIP. However it’s been recently unearthed that D-Link had drivers for their DE-100 & DE-200 models, and as it happens the DE-200 is a NE-2000 compatible card!
That means that Qemu can install/run Xenix, and it can get onto the internet* (there is a catch, there is always a catch).
You can download the driver either from github or my password protected mirror. Simply untar the floppy under Xenix (tar -xvf /dev/fd0) and do the install via ‘mkdev dlnk’
Setting up the driver is… tedious. Much like the system itself. I found Qemu 0.90 works great, and is crazy fast (in part to GCC 3) even though Qemu 0.9’s floppy emulation isn’t good enough to install or read disks. With all the updates to Qemu 3.1 use that, it’ll read the disks, and allow for networking.
To give some idea of speed I ran the age old Dhrystone test, compiled by GCC 1.37.1 and scored the following:
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 5000000 passes = 8 This machine benchmarks at 625000 dhrystones/second
When compared to the SGI Indy’s 133Mhz R4600SC score of 194,000 @ 50000 loops that makes my Xeon W3565 322 times faster, under Qemu 0.90! And that’s under Windows!
Setting up the commandline/launching is pretty much this:
qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 16 -net nic,model=ne2k_isa -net user -redir tcp:42323::23 -hda ..\xenix.vmdk added SLIRP adding a [GenuineIntelC] family 5 model 4 stepping 3 CPU added 16 megabytes of RAM trying to load video rom pc-bios/vgabios-cirrus.bin added parallel port 0x378 7 added NE2000(isa) 0x320 10 pci_piix3_ide_init PIIX3 IDE ide_init2 [0] s->cylinders 203 s->heads 16 s->sectors 63 ide_init2 [1] s->cylinders 0 s->heads 0 s->sectors 0 ide_init2 [0] s->cylinders 2 s->heads 16 s->sectors 63 ide_init2 [1] s->cylinders 0 s->heads 0 s->sectors 0 added PS/2 keyboard added PS/2 mouse added Floppy Controller 0x3f0 irq 6 dma 2 Bus 0, device 0, function 0: Host bridge: PCI device 8086:1237 Bus 0, device 1, function 0: ISA bridge: PCI device 8086:7000 Bus 0, device 1, function 1: IDE controller: PCI device 8086:7010 BAR4: I/O at 0xffffffff [0x000e]. Bus 0, device 1, function 3: Class 0680: PCI device 8086:7113 IRQ 0. Bus 0, device 2, function 0: VGA controller: PCI device 1013:00b8 BAR0: 32 bit memory at 0xffffffff [0x01fffffe]. BAR1: 32 bit memory at 0xffffffff [0x00000ffe].
In the file /etc/tcp the default installation does a terrible job of setting up the NIC. I changed the ifconfig line to this:
Which at least brings it up a bit better. I added in a gratuitous ping also in the startup script to build the arp for the gateway.
ping 10.0.2.2 32 1
Which brings us to the next point, the routing command is broken after loading the D-Link driver. I tried all the available TCP/IP drivers for Xenix (1.1.3.f 1.2.0e).
# route add default 10.0.2.2 1 add net default: gateway 10.0.2.2 flags 0x3: No such device or address
So no dice there. And yes, for SLIP/no interfaces the route command works as expected, just not with the DLINK driver.
However local connections from the host machine do work, so yes, you can telnet into the VM!
Welcome to 1990!
This makes using Xenix far more usable say for managing files, control/compiling etc.
For you die hard IRC fans, all is not lost, you can simply run a local proxy (See: Teaching an old IRC dog some new tricks) on your host machine, and point the irc client to 10.0.2.2
IRCII on Xenix/Qemu
So there you go, all 20 Xenix fans out there! Not only a way to get back online, but to do it in SPEED!
Thanks to Mark for pointing out that there has been tremendous progress with version 3.1 of Qemu, and it’s TCG user speed is up to the 0.90 levels of speed (at least with dhrystone/Xenix), and it just takes a little (lot) of massaging to get up and running with Xenix with the right flags:
I was kindly sent these a while ago from an avid reader, and I tried to get them to boot up into anything useful and didn’t get anywhere. I’m sure emulators of today are probably up to task, be it Bochs/PCem/86Box or even Qemu.
This is nothing short of amazing. In the last update, 2ine was running simple 32bit programs on Linux, and providing a portable API set to allow strict OS/2 API based programs to run on Linux.
And now Ryan has turned his focus onto 16bit support for 2ine, which you can read about here:
As you can read right now It’s running a simple OpenWatcom 16bit hello world based program. The 16bit OS/2 and 32bit OS/2 API’s ended up having different calling sizes, among other issues which had complicated the bridge program. However Ryan’s newer use of scripts to generate the required glue for the API’s at least mean that adding the 16bit/32bit calling conventions & required bridges/glue is at least now automated.
This is super cool, as this will eventually open the door to Watcom C/Fortran, Zortec C, Microsoft Basic/C/Cobol/Fortran and of course many other languages that burst out into the initial OS/2 scene before the eventual weight of the SDK & associated costs doomed OS/2 to failure.
Seriously, for those among us who love OS/2 and have like $5 to spare, send some encouragement to Ryan… 🙂
Date: 13 Apr 91 18:17:44 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 18
I've recently ported bash to minix-386 (nice, but takes about 300kB of
RAM). It's been "tested" by me using it all the time (good editing and
history - couldn't live without it any more), but I won't make any
guarantees. If anybody is interested in cdiffs against bash-1.05, please
mail me (I'll post if there is enough interest).
The port definitely needs GCC, and 386-minix. ST-minix will probably
work as well (I've sent it to one ST-minixer), after changeing a #define
LITTLE_ENDIAN to BIG_ENDIAN. If the port already has been done by
someone else - just ignore this message.
Linus Torvalds [email protected]
PS. I've hacked the kernel to accept gcc-compiled programs directly
without going through gcc2minix, but I haven't tested it very much yet
(bash works though, so most things probably will). Changes are trivial,
mail me if interested. (And yes - it accepts old minix format too - you
don't have to recompile everything :-)
Naturally it’s about the impending birth of Linux. First he needed to get GCC running under Minix 386, but I didn’t know at the time that he had patches floating around to allow Minix to directly run the GCC A.OUT format executables.
Scary to think that if Minix had allowed submissions and ‘bloat’ that Linux would have never been.
On the other hand, much like 386BSD the backpressure of having some kind of free BSD/UNIX system which did take in submissions was overwhelming, with the false start of 386BSD going the route of Minix and in that first critical year not pulling in any of the additional patches, while Linux grew by leaps and bounds. By the time the AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit hit, well the game was already in Linux’s favour, even with it’s already fragmented distro base.
AKA for everyone but me, who never read the readme. For some reason I got pointed back to my old GCC 1.27 on MS-DOS article, and wanted to see when the 386 really did first appear, and after a bunch of messing around it was shipped in GCC 1.25
Sat Jul 16 14:18:00 1988 Richard Stallman (rms at sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu)
* *386*: New files.
So there we are, July 16th 1988!
But looking a the ‘old-releases/gcc-1‘ directory there is no gcc-1.25.tar file! So how to get there from here? Well the simple answer is to take gcc-1.27, and reverse patch it down using the patches in the patches directory. The only catch of course is to read prior patches to the reverse to see if any files need to be renamed, otherwise there will be failures… specifically in the file gcc.diff-1.25-1.26
So normally I’ve always patched going up, but with the magical -R flag, you can go backwards! So taking 1.27 you can go to 1.26 by running
patch -p1 -R < ../gcc.diff-1.26-1.27
And this will take 1.27 and downgrade it to 1.26. As mentioned above the renames for going from 1.26 to 1.25 needs to be done in reverse:
Before installing these diffs, rename files as follows:
Got to say it’s really cool that it works with hardware 3D acceleration.
I may want to try to do something with it later on, however I’ll need to get it a case.
I have a cold, and yeah sound like crap. I’ll add specs later as I think my fever is kicking back in. Sigh. But yeah basically
P4 board / CPU / RAM $150 HKD
GTX-460 card $180 HKD
Sound Blaster Live! $20 HKD
37GB IDE disk $20 HKD
PS/2 Keyboard $20 HKD
PS/2 Mouse $10 HKD
700 Watt Power Supply $150 HKD
So yeah ~550 HKD or $70 USD. Not bad.
So a little closer look at the hardware. Â I’m lucky that there is an active used hardware market here in Hong Kong, elsewhere in the world you either have HAM radio events, ‘boot sales’, garage sales, or for the truly desperate, eBay, Yahoo auctions, and AliExpress. Â My go to place here is of course the Capital Computer Centre, where they at least will test stuff before selling it. Â I know I’m old fashioned but I like buying in person.
Intel P4 Mother Board
I had originally chosen this board to mess around with Darwin.  I wanted something new enough to have a P4, but old enough to still have an older ‘parallel’ EIDE controller port. And the Intel D945GNT, board certainly was up to that task.  Like ancient Darwin, AROS works best with either parallel disks, or SATA disks in older parallel emulation.  The markings on this board are a little hard to read as the bigger numbers are the product testing/radio compliance numbers, and the model number is a bunch of possible models as I guess they like to make so many variations on a single board.
close up of the D945GNT
Here is a close up, and E210882 is *NOT* the mode number. Â Nothing like confusion.
The Intel D945GNT motherboards built in NIC, the Intel PRO/100
One of the big reasons for using the Intel board, is that it has an onboard NIC, and Intel of course uses Intel NIC’s so it has the very compatible Intel PRO/100 VE Desktop Adapter.
While you can get these on PCI cards, and use other boards, I figured since I was going to buy a board anyways, and once things get this old the people selling them really don’t care who made the board, but rather that this is an old P4 board, they all sell for the same price.
Another plus about this board is that it is new enough not to have AGP, but rather the new and exciting PCI Express.  This board as the Express x16, which of course is perfect for a ‘large’ GPU.  AROS has a port of the Gallium3D nouveau driver, making this perfect for a super cheap GTX 460.
I shopped around for a while and I found this accelerator, that although has no apparent labeling at least on the flip side it has the identification. I really don’t know what is the fastest GPU you can get for AROS, but this one seems to work just fine, and it’s what Stephen Jones is using so that is what I went with.
Inno3D GTX-460
And looking under AROS, this is how the PCI resources show up for the video card.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
This was an old card, and it looked like either the OEM didn’t put any stickers on it, or someone had taken them off. Â Either way I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter as it works just fine. Â Sure the GTX 1080 is over five times faster, but the open Gallium driver won’t work with it as Nvidia has done their best to break open stuff, and even if it did, you can’t buy a 1080 for less than a pizza. Â At least not yet.
For some reason, I had begun collecting older and cheap Sound Blaster cards when I see them. Â I wasn’t going to spend more than $50 HKD ($7 USD) for them, so I don’t have an Audigy cards yet, but I did have this Live card. Â At the time I didn’t think it was anything special, although the EMU10k chip is desirable, and popular for much older systems.
Sound Blaster Live!
This card is the CT0100 model. And it works great!
CT0100
And this is how AROS sees the card
Sound Blaster Live! with EMU10k1 chip
The AROS HCLÂ is a little confusing to me, but it all seems to work. Â If it weren’t for the Stephen Jones video I wouldn’t have tried as it implies it won’t work.
Good news, it actually works! Â I was using the version 1.1 WAD, so honestly weird crashes really aren’t unexpected. Â I haven’t looked much at what to do with audio, but I was really impressed compared to the Qauake II wars, it was really surprising to not only see DooM run on the first shot in real metal, but the keyboard works as well. Â Well enough for me to pick a level, and get killed.
Naturally it doesn’t work under Windows, however it runs fine with MS-DOS mode.
No really, it’s Catacomb 3-D: The Descent. Â First ported to 32-bit SDL by NotStiller. Â Me being the person I am, I fixed a slight bug regarding binary files on Windows, and MS-DOS, then cleaned up some of the C++ syntax (yuck!) making it far more C89 friendly. Â And of course, hot off the heels of DooM for GO32 DPMI, I was able to get it to build and run using GCC 1.39 and GO32.
I know most people really won’t care, but I found it kind of interesting. Â I should try to see if it’ll run on actual hardware, just as a comparison of tightly optimized Borland C++ / Assembly vs 100% pure C on DJGPP. Â The best tech of 1991 for sure!
