Seems like you're firmly in the footsteps of the creators now... :-)

*Paul Riley*

Mo: +86 186 8227 8332
Email: paul@rileyriot.com



On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 at 20:52, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>     > From: Paul Riley
>
>     > So mounting Mini-Unix on a running V6 system I guess allows you to
> run
>     > Mini-Unix user mode binaries stuff
>
> Ah, no. They are all link-loaded to run at TOPSYS (060000), so won't run on
> V6 native.
>
>     > Or do you plan to recompile on a stable system?
>
> Well, I need to find out what the problem is, first.
>
>
> Still, notable progress: using my 'mount the Mini-Unix RK pack on a V6
> system'
> hack (which woked fine; the native V6 'icheck' and 'dcheck' work on that
> pack), I was able to sucessfully compile a few tweaked system modules (to
> get
> my usual line-editing chars, and turn off that irritating lower-case mode),
> and then build an OS load which could sucessfully boot. So good progress
> there. A couple of things I learned:
>
> - MiniUnix tools use the 'new' archive format, so the V6 vanilla 'ar'
> doen't
> grok MiniUnix archives (e.g. lib1/lib2). I have a 'nar', which I found on
> the
> 'Shoppa disks', which can deal with them. (We don't have source for it, but
> I'll bet the MIT PWB1 system has that; I'll get to that eventuallly.
> There's also
> an 'ar.c' on the MiniUnix disk; between the two, we'll be able to
> reconstitute
> source for 'nar'.)
>
> - Also, the vanilla V6 linker, 'ld', _also_ doesn't understand new
> archives;
> so the shell file to build a new system, 'shld':
>
>   ld -a -x low.o conf.o lib1 lib2
>
> blows out because it doesn't grok the libraries. Also, the '-a' flag, which
> says 'link starting at 0, not TOPSYS', doesn't exist in the V6 'ld'.
>
> I got around all that by unpacking lib1 (using 'nar', above) - it only
> contains
> two files - and then listing the files to link directly:
>
>   ld -x low.o conf.o syso emulo dev/kl.o dev/devstart.o dev/rk.o
>
> The vanilla V6 linker of course produces an output linked at 0 without
> the -a flag.
>
>
> At some point, I'll produce a 'MiniUnix ld' on vanilla V6, so I can build
> MiniUnix versions of applications there; the first will be the shell, so I
> don't have to keep typing 'chdir' instead of 'cd'! :-)
>
> Then on to trying to find out why MiniUnix crashes whenever I try and do
> anything significant.
>
>        Noel
>