Back to 386 BSD

Well gunkies is getting a little more life to it, and Dugo contributed this install guide for 386 BSD. Along the way I installed it again with floppy images, and I hit the same fault again:

/386bsd: wd0a: overlaps open partition (b)

However this time I noticed that if you keep on rebooting, it’ll actually stop complaining and work!

So not only was I able to recover from a crash after trying to install the source code, but I was able to complete the install, and install the patchkits! What this has resulted in, is that Qemu can now run 386BSD!!! And it’s significantly faster then Bochs. Not to mention you gain the whole SLiRP / Usermode networking.

So far I’ve tested this with Qemu-0.11.0 just fine. I’m not sure about other levels… so it’s another YMMV.

So now I’ve been able to not only rebuild the kernel & world, but the following programs:

gzip 1.2.4
unzip 5.52
irc II-4.4
lynx 2.8.2

Oh yeah, and another f2c build, and yes it’ll run Dungeon!

So for the few people interested in some BSD history, as this is the ‘first’ Net/2 derived freely available release in a qemu format right here (sorry, link removed, if you want it install this instead).

Just uncompress the qcow2 file (sorry it’ll blow out to 500MB), then run Qemu something like this:

i386-softmmu/qemu.exe -L pc-bios -hda bsd386.qcow2 -M isapc -net nic -net user -no-reboot -m 256

And with any luck, you’ll find the VM booting, and all set and ready to roll. If it comes up in single user-mode, just close Qemu & fire it up again..

I’ll probably put together a windows install package for this later, but for now I figure I’ll unleash some 386BSD onto the world.

10 thoughts on “Back to 386 BSD

  1. I can even build mksh and Perl 5.003_07 on it 😉
    I’m now trying to compile lynx-2.8.7(may try older versions if failed)

    • awesome! It was amazing how 386BSD 0.0 was .. barely booting but how quickly the internet community was able to transform it into something so usable & awesome.

      • I can build lynx2.8.8dev.12 in 386BSD-0.1! (but HTML.o is compiled in NetBSD 0.9 with 386BSD-0.1’s ld/as and your gcc-2.5.8-386bsd.tar.gz)

        • Nice! I want to say there was some trick about building lynx -O0 on html.o, or some linker flag for a large table, but I may be mixing in my VAX here… lol

          Welcome to the small club of 386BSD-0.1 users!

          • tried -O0 doesn’t help here.

            BTW the NetBSD-0.8 system is heavily broken, will it be fixed sometime?

          • NetBSD 0.8 was extracted from CVS, and I pasted in some NetBSD 0.9 to get it to compile… The NetBSD 0.9 that I found was intact but I’m not sure if we’ll ever find a real copy of NetBSD 0.8 ….

  2. BTW any success about 386BSD in QEMU?
    I made it installed in 504MB HD, and recompiled kernel (with ddb, ed, and inet) so I can continue when hitting trap 28, but Disk I/O is very unstable and CPU halts frequently.

      • No, I haven’t really looked at 386BSD 1.0 as it had such a limited release, and almost all the chatter on usenet is how impossible it was to install… I think it was too little too late compared to net/free. And the person I was working with 386 BSD seemed to have up and disappeared….

        • I followed Dugo’s guide. mem has to limit to 24MB. DOS loader is need for VMWare.
          and 386BSD’s sed breaks autoconf scripts, have to build GNU’s sed-2.05.
          and 0.1’s gcc virtual memory bug still exists in 1.0, lynx HTML.c cannot be compiled in 1.0.

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