Re: [9fans] on the topic of viruses

Re: [9fans] on the topic of viruses

[dmr]

Might as well respond to Rob, though there are several
suspended historical questions.

The first VAX machines our own group (1127) bought were VAX 11/750s.
The Reiser+London folks in Bell Labs at Holmdel had already done
the 32V (on 11/780) that travelled to Berkeley and became 4.* BSD;
here, we were still on PDP-11/70. About the same time our
larger organization (112) decided to buy a central server for
things like mail and Usenet and various shared data: this was the
VAX 11/780 called Alice (I get mail first sent to dmr@alice.att.com).
These all, at first, ran 32V, but not the version that was
distributed.  John Reiser and Tom London did quite a few
interesting things, including an inherently more sophisticated
virtual memory scheme than earliest BSDs--at least, for example,
treating the VM page pool as integrated with the buffer cache.

However, at some point the Holmdel group perceived that
as a Unix research project they were at an end point;
USG and System III and then V were being
thought of as a potential product as divestiture approached.

They, and we, decided that 32V was over.  The VAX BSD distributions
had begun, and Chesson brought in an early BSD (I think 4.1c)
and ran it on the experimental 750.  No one here was enthusiastic
about touching its paging scheme, but this (maybe a slightly
updated) system had the character-device part scooped out
and replaced by the stream I/O mechanisms in 8th Edition.
Once this was working well enough, it displaced the 32V
systems, eventually on alice and her companion rabbit.

The early 11/750 had plenty of bugs.  I forget the precise
details of why copy-on-write wasn't easy, but it was
approximately that incorrect status was stored on a
a write-to-read-only page fault.  This or a similar bug
also affected stack extension.  (Something like: if a
calls instruction is the last one on a page, and the
stack pointer refers to a page not in memory, the
saved instruction location is not that of the faulting
instruction, but something else).

Re Presotto's observation about ICP/IP:  the
8th edition system including Streams was already pretty
much in place by the time that Robert Morris adapted
the then-current BSD TCP/IP stack to streams.  At that time,
we were using either serial communication over various modems,
and more notably Datakit. Looking back at this, one of
the satisfying things is that the communication structure
built then was adaptable so smoothly to TCP/IP when
the protocol's importance became undeniable.

	Dennis

[9fans] SMC PCMCIA Ethernet card

[Mike Fletcher]

Which ethernet driver comes closest for the
SMC 8040TX Fixed-Port PCMCIA Adapter?  It claims to be 
ne2000 compatible.

I've tried the EC2T, but it doesn't set up the #l0 driver.

aux/pcmcia sees it as a '10/100 Port Attached PC Card'

MS Windows runs it OK on port 0x300 and irq 11, so I know
the card works.

I'd appreciate any ideas anyone has on it.

-Mike Fletcher
 EECS Dept
 Tulane University

Re: [9fans] SMC PCMCIA Ethernet card

[jmk]

Assuming it really is an NE2000 compatible card, try putting an ID
string to match on from the card in the plan9.ini config line, e.g.

	ether0=type=ec2t port=0x300 irq=11 id=10/100

--jim

On Tue Oct  2 09:27:29 EDT 2001, mlf@eecs.tulane.edu wrote:
> 
> Which ethernet driver comes closest for the
> SMC 8040TX Fixed-Port PCMCIA Adapter?  It claims to be 
> ne2000 compatible.
> 
> I've tried the EC2T, but it doesn't set up the #l0 driver.
> 
> aux/pcmcia sees it as a '10/100 Port Attached PC Card'
> 
> MS Windows runs it OK on port 0x300 and irq 11, so I know
> the card works.
> 
> I'd appreciate any ideas anyone has on it.
> 
> -Mike Fletcher
>  EECS Dept
>  Tulane University