Category Archives: Net/2

386BSD 0.0 on sourceforge

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I didn’t realize that I never uploaded this over there. After a discussion on the passing anniversary on the TUHS mailing list I had to dig out my installed copy.

I had forgotten just how rough around the edges this was, as it’s missing quite a few utilities from the Net/2 tape, and isn’t complete enough to come up in multiuser mode, but it is capable of booting up.

Although 386BSD itself was really short lived with its effective short death in the subsequent release it paved the way for an internet only release of a BSD Unix by just 2 people. And it closed up the glaring hole of the lack of a free i386 port of Net/2.

The natural competition was Mach386, which was based around the older 4.3BSD Tahoe, and the up and coming BSDI, which had many former CSRG people which were also racing to deliver their own i386 binary / source release for sale.

One thing about this era is that you had SUN apparently forced out of the BSD business instead to work with the USL on making SYSV usable, leaving NeXT as the next big seller of BSD. The commercial world was going SYSV in a big way, and the only place that was to have a market was on the micros. And for those of us who wanted something open and free 386BSD paved the way realizing the dream of the Net/2 release. A free Unix for the common person, the true democratization of computing by letting common people use, develop and distribute it independently of any larger organization.

It’s almost a shame that GNU had stuck with the unrealized dream of a hierarchy of daemons, instead of adopting the BSD kernel with a GNU userland, on top of that tendy micro kernel Mach.

The landscape radically changed with the infamous ad proudly proclaiming “It’s UNIX”.

While USL was happy to fight both BSDI and the CSRG they never persued Bill Jolitz. And after the internet flame and lawsuit dragged on, neither of the splinter groups NetBSD or FreeBSD caught up, although both did reset upon the release of the 4.4BSD Lite 2 code.

I zipped up Bochs along with the disk here: 386BSD-0.0-with-bochs.7z

Unloading some BSD/OS CD’s

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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.

So they are now up on archive where I also found version 4 up there so I may as well flesh out the collection.

Enjoy!

Probably figured out why Net/2 doesn’t work.

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It’s not unresolved symbols, but rather deleted bodies…

From 22 years ago:

Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!darwin.sura.net!Sirius.dfn.de!fauern!unido!mcsun!fuug!sics.se!seunet!kullmar!compuram!pgd
From: [email protected]
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386,comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: 386's UNIX kernel source
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 11 Jan 92 08:24:27 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Lines: 50

Richard Tobin ([email protected]) writes:
: In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Lee M J McLoughlin) writes:
: >I can't say for sure but in the second Berkeley networking release
: >there appears to be enough source for unix and enough 386 specific
: >code to actually get a system up and running.
: 
: The following from kern_exec.c suggests otherwise:
: 
......
:             /*
:              * Body deleted.
:              */
:             return (ENOSYS);
:     }
: 
: There are other similar functions.  Also, the standalone stuff needed
: for bootstrapping is incomplete.

Routines which are thus missing from the kernel are:
acct(), sysacct(), execve() with friends, physio(),
minphys(), rminit(), rmalloc(), rmfree(), ptrace(),
procxmt(), profil(),  cinit(), getc(), q_to_p(),
ndqb(), ndflush(), putc(), b_to_q(), nextc(),
unputc(),  bufinit(), bread(), breada(), bwrite(),
bdwrite(), bawrite(), brelse(), incore(), getblk(),
geteblk(), allocbuf(), getnewbuf(), biowait(), biodone()

I have looked them up in the unix v7 sources, and they amount to
approximately 800 lines of code.
Some I cannot find there. They are:
minphys(), rminit(), rmalloc(), rmfree(), procxmt(), nextc(),
unputc(), bufinit(), allocbuf(), getnewbuf()
Do they really containt AT&T code, or were they just kicked out "by
mistake"?

In any case, unless there are more surprises, it should not be too
hard to rewrite these routines. Many are quite straightforward.
Most routines contain 10-20 lines of code. One only 2.
Some are ridiculusly simple. In fact, I wonder how they can be
rewritten to not be identical with the AT&T ones. 

Now, I wonder, are these routines really identical to the Unix v7
routines, or are they modified by the BSD people?
That is, would it be possible to plug in the V7 routines, modify them,
and get it working, without having seen the actual bsd routines?

-- 
Per Lindqvist

Internet: [email protected]   Fidonet: Per Lindqvist @ 2:201/332

So that is probably why it ‘works’ but doesn’t work.  Oops.

More NET/2 to 386BSD 0.0 fun

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I just got an email that the ‘officially sanctioned’ patches to Net/2 are still located here.  Just about every 386BSD 0.0 mirror that survives is missing these files.  So I made a copy of them on mine, here.

This dates the patches to February 26th 1992, and all the 3 1/2″ binaries being the 4th of March 1992.  And for more confusion the 5 1/4″ floppies date to the 17th of March.  The 40kb worth of user patches ended around June of 1992.

Also of interest is the Dr Dobbs articles…

Porting Unix to the 386: a Practical Approach.

PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THREE INITIAL PC UTILITIES

Porting Unix to the 386: Research & the Commercial Sector Where does BSD fit in? 

 

Happy new year!

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I thought I’d go ahead and see if I could get Net/2 to build on my own.

Net/2

Net/2

Well it compiles, and tries to boot….   Sadly there is no adb or gdb support.  How on earth did people debug this stuff then?  I’m not sure where the crash location is, or what to do about it.  But I thought this was really cool.

I’ve also tried to track down 4.4BSD encumbered, which was released around the same time as the 4.4BSD-Lite1 which was after the AT&T vs BSDi/CSRG thing..  Or even the release that parallels the Net/2 release…

Anyways, happy 2014!

Old BSD musings

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I was thinking after rebuilding the Mach disk, that back in the say it was insinuated that the changes from Net/2 to 386BSD 0.0 were quite minimal.  So I figured I should take a look.  The first thing to do would be to clean up Net/2’s kernel to look more like 386 BSD’s.  This was trivial as there wasn’t much of anything structure wise done.  Running the patch was pretty easy:

$ diff -ruN ../../../../net.2/sys . > /tmp/net2-386bsd00.patch

The patch is about 1MB.  Much larger than I expected!  Applying the patch to Net/2 shows that a substantial amount of files changed:

$ patch -p0 < /tmp/net2-386bsd00.patch
patching file ./conf/files
patching file ./i386/conf/GENERIC.i386
patching file ./i386/conf/Makefile.i386
patching file ./i386/conf/devices.i386
patching file ./i386/conf/files.i386
patching file ./i386/i386/autoconf.c
patching file ./i386/i386/conf.c
patching file ./i386/i386/genassym.c
patching file ./i386/i386/locore.s
patching file ./i386/i386/machdep.c
patching file ./i386/i386/pmap.c
patching file ./i386/i386/symbols.raw
patching file ./i386/i386/trap.c
patching file ./i386/i386/vm_machdep.c
patching file ./i386/include/psl.h
patching file ./i386/isa/com.c
patching file ./i386/isa/fd.c
patching file ./i386/isa/isa.c
patching file ./i386/isa/npx.c
patching file ./i386/isa/pccons.c
patching file ./i386/isa/wd.c
patching file ./i386/isa/wt.c
patching file ./i386/stand/Makefile
patching file ./i386/stand/bmap.c
patching file ./i386/stand/boot.c
patching file ./i386/stand/bootxx.c
patching file ./i386/stand/breadxx.c
patching file ./i386/stand/cga.c
patching file ./i386/stand/conf.c
patching file ./i386/stand/confxx.c
patching file ./i386/stand/fd.c
patching file ./i386/stand/fdbootblk.c
patching file ./i386/stand/fs.c
patching file ./i386/stand/kbd.c
patching file ./i386/stand/libsa/Makefile
patching file ./i386/stand/libsmsa/Makefile
patching file ./i386/stand/prf.c
patching file ./i386/stand/saio.h
patching file ./i386/stand/srt0.c
patching file ./i386/stand/trimhd.c
patching file ./i386/stand/wd.c
patching file ./kern/Makefile
patching file ./kern/init_main.c
patching file ./kern/kern__physio.c
patching file ./kern/kern_descrip.c
patching file ./kern/kern_exec.c
patching file ./kern/kern_execve.c
patching file ./kern/kern_exit.c
patching file ./kern/kern_fork.c
patching file ./kern/kern_malloc.c
patching file ./kern/kern_physio.c
patching file ./kern/kern_proc.c
patching file ./kern/kern_sig.c
patching file ./kern/kern_subr.c
patching file ./kern/makesyscalls.sh
patching file ./kern/subr_rlist.c
patching file ./kern/subr_rmap.c
patching file ./kern/sys_process.c
patching file ./kern/syscalls.master
patching file ./kern/tty.c
patching file ./kern/tty_pty.c
patching file ./kern/tty_ring.c
patching file ./kern/tty_subr.c
patching file ./kern/uipc_mbuf.c
patching file ./kern/vfs__bio.c
patching file ./kern/vfs_bio.c
patching file ./net/af.h
patching file ./net/bpf.c
patching file ./net/bpf.h
patching file ./net/bpfdesc.h
patching file ./net/if.h
patching file ./net/if_arp.h
patching file ./net/if_dl.h
patching file ./net/if_llc.h
patching file ./net/if_sl.c
patching file ./net/if_slvar.h
patching file ./net/if_types.h
patching file ./net/netisr.h
patching file ./net/radix.h
patching file ./net/raw_cb.h
patching file ./net/route.h
patching file ./net/slcompress.h
patching file ./netinet/icmp_var.h
patching file ./netinet/if_ether.h
patching file ./netinet/in.h
patching file ./netinet/in_pcb.h
patching file ./netinet/in_proto.c
patching file ./netinet/in_systm.h
patching file ./netinet/in_var.h
patching file ./netinet/ip.h
patching file ./netinet/ip_icmp.h
patching file ./netinet/ip_var.h
patching file ./netinet/tcp.h
patching file ./netinet/tcp_debug.h
patching file ./netinet/tcp_fsm.h
patching file ./netinet/tcp_seq.h
patching file ./netinet/tcp_timer.h
patching file ./netinet/tcp_var.h
patching file ./netinet/tcpip.h
patching file ./netinet/udp.h
patching file ./netinet/udp_var.h
patching file ./nfs/nfs.h
patching file ./nfs/nfs_subs.c
patching file ./nfs/nfs_vnops.c
patching file ./nfs/nfscompress.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsdiskless.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsiom.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsm_subs.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsmount.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsnode.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsrvcache.h
patching file ./nfs/nfsv2.h
patching file ./nfs/rpcv2.h
patching file ./nfs/xdr_subs.h
patching file ./stand/printf.c
patching file ./stand/saerrno.h
patching file ./stand/saioctl.h
patching file ./sys/acct.h
patching file ./sys/buf.h
patching file ./sys/callout.h
patching file ./sys/cdefs.h
patching file ./sys/clist.h
patching file ./sys/conf.h
patching file ./sys/dir.h
patching file ./sys/disklabel.h
patching file ./sys/dkbad.h
patching file ./sys/dkstat.h
patching file ./sys/dmap.h
patching file ./sys/domain.h
patching file ./sys/errno.h
patching file ./sys/exec.h
patching file ./sys/fcntl.h
patching file ./sys/fifo.h
patching file ./sys/file.h
patching file ./sys/filedesc.h
patching file ./sys/gprof.h
patching file ./sys/ioctl.h
patching file ./sys/ioctl_compat.h
patching file ./sys/ipc.h
patching file ./sys/kernel.h
patching file ./sys/kinfo.h
patching file ./sys/kinfo_proc.h
patching file ./sys/ktrace.h
patching file ./sys/malloc.h
patching file ./sys/map.h
patching file ./sys/mapmem.h
patching file ./sys/mbuf.h
patching file ./sys/mman.h
patching file ./sys/mount.h
patching file ./sys/msgbuf.h
patching file ./sys/mtio.h
patching file ./sys/namei.h
patching file ./sys/param.h
patching file ./sys/proc.h
patching file ./sys/protosw.h
patching file ./sys/ptrace.h
patching file ./sys/reboot.h
patching file ./sys/resource.h
patching file ./sys/resourcevar.h
patching file ./sys/seg.h
patching file ./sys/shm.h
patching file ./sys/signal.h
patching file ./sys/signalvar.h
patching file ./sys/socket.h
patching file ./sys/socketvar.h
patching file ./sys/specdev.h
patching file ./sys/stat.h
patching file ./sys/syscall.h
patching file ./sys/syslimits.h
patching file ./sys/syslog.h
patching file ./sys/systm.h
patching file ./sys/tablet.h
patching file ./sys/termios.h
patching file ./sys/time.h
patching file ./sys/timeb.h
patching file ./sys/times.h
patching file ./sys/tprintf.h
patching file ./sys/trace.h
patching file ./sys/tty.h
patching file ./sys/ttychars.h
patching file ./sys/ttydefaults.h
patching file ./sys/ttydev.h
patching file ./sys/types.h
patching file ./sys/ucred.h
patching file ./sys/uio.h
patching file ./sys/un.h
patching file ./sys/unistd.h
patching file ./sys/unpcb.h
patching file ./sys/user.h
patching file ./sys/vadvise.h
patching file ./sys/vcmd.h
patching file ./sys/vlimit.h
patching file ./sys/vmmeter.h
patching file ./sys/vnode.h
patching file ./sys/vsio.h
patching file ./sys/vtimes.h
patching file ./sys/wait.h
patching file ./ufs/dinode.h
patching file ./ufs/dir.h
patching file ./ufs/fs.h
patching file ./ufs/inode.h
patching file ./ufs/lockf.h
patching file ./ufs/mfs_vnops.c
patching file ./ufs/mfsiom.h
patching file ./ufs/mfsnode.h
patching file ./ufs/quota.h
patching file ./ufs/ufsmount.h
patching file ./vm/device_pager.h
patching file ./vm/lock.h
patching file ./vm/pmap.h
patching file ./vm/queue.h
patching file ./vm/swap_pager.c
patching file ./vm/swap_pager.h
patching file ./vm/vm.h
patching file ./vm/vm_fault.c
patching file ./vm/vm_glue.c
patching file ./vm/vm_inherit.h
patching file ./vm/vm_kern.c
patching file ./vm/vm_kern.h
patching file ./vm/vm_map.h
patching file ./vm/vm_object.h
patching file ./vm/vm_page.h
patching file ./vm/vm_pageout.h
patching file ./vm/vm_pager.h
patching file ./vm/vm_param.h
patching file ./vm/vm_prot.h
patching file ./vm/vm_statistics.h
patching file ./vm/vm_swap.c
patching file ./vm/vm_user.h
patching file ./vm/vnode_pager.h

Clearly the move from Net/2 to 386BSD 0.0 was not trivial.  Which I’ve always wondered, as quotes like this:

Closing the gap from the Networking Release 2 distribution to a fully functioning system did not take long. Within six months of the release, Bill Jolitz had written replacements for the six missing files. He promptly released a fully compiled and bootable system for the 386-based PC architecture which he called 386/BSD.

Make it sound like Bill spent six months on six files.

I guess the real question is can I find a so called encumbered 4.4 BSD, and compare that to the lite to see the magical “six files” and then check the drift into Net/2, to 386BSD 0.0 …