[TUHS] Re: Porting Unix v6 to i386

[mike@ducky.net (Mike Haertel)]

>Having looked through the source of v6 and v7  the comments are shall
>we say minimalistic to people who are not as familiar with the PDP 
>architecture as say Ritchie and Thompson - ie ME!   Hence the Lions
>commentary makes life a darn site easier.
>
>I am not disagreeing with the second point you have made.   However the
>point is that V7 is a development on from V6 and the memory management 
>is more complex and thus requires more work.

V6 is much more difficult to port.  Reason: it had never been ported.

By contrast V7 source code contains numerous cleanups that were
made for the Interdata 8/32 port.  (One of those cleanups included
the deletion of the famous "You are not expected to understand this"
comment in the kernel--because that C code for context switching 
could not be made to work on other architectures.  Whereas you can
port V7 context switch just by rewriting the supporting asm routines.)

Another problem with V6 is that a significant number of the user level
utility programs were still written in asm.  E.g. cat, strip, sum,
and even nroff.

You can still use the Lions book pretty well as a reference for
understanding the V7 kernel.  The code may not be identical but the
concepts are mostly the same.