[COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

[imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)]

It depends a lot on when.

For pure research V7 / 2BSD / 4BSD that was true. You can give the
install.ms from these releases as a reference. It was a lot more daunting
than today, and often times only bug fixes warranted a recompile. You can
find references in the 2.11BSD patch series to the 'annual recompilation of
the sources' which Steve did and where he'd always find something.

However, after that, everything was binaries. The kernel you got was a
bunch of .o files (even for the V7 ports), though often you had all the
source to the drivers (but not the core of the kernel). I have said files
for Venix, though there it was an extra cost option it seems (I say seems,
since I've not found a price sheet for it from the era, though I have the
disks). DEC's ultrix was binary. Sun's SunOS. All the Unisoft ports to 68k
machines. Sony's NEWS workstations likewise. HP's unix offerings too. Sure,
you could get a source license, sometimes, but they kept those expensive.

IBM and VMS were always binary only (though again, you could buy source if
you had the right amount of $$$ and leverage).

So I'm not sure what old days you were talking about, or which
machines....  The BSD build.sh and/or make world were a bit of an anomaly
imho. Once Linux got distributions the whole notion of building it yourself
faded somewhat.

Warner


On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the
> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for
> a big computer was from source.  Now I've been asked for a reference,
> and I can't find one!  Can anybody help?
>
> Greg
> --
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