[TUHS] Other operating systems on the PDP-11

[TUHS] Other operating systems on the PDP-11

[Steven M. Schultz]

Hi -

> From: Warren Toomey <wkt at minnie.tuhs.org>
> In article by Greg 'groggy' Lehey:
> > The big issue is address space.  It's difficult enough shoehorning
> > 2.11BSD onto the PDP-11.  It's well-nigh impossible to retrofit 32 bit
> > operating systems.  But Steven M. Schulz will doubtless give you a

> More specifically, the issue is data space. Using overlays, you can
> have a process with more than 64Kbytes of instruction space on a PDP-11,
> but the maximum data space that a process can have is 64Kbytes.
> 
> The kernel is in a similar situation, but with some PDP-11 models
> there is kernel mode and supervisor mode, giving you two separate
> 64Kbytes instruction + 64Kbytes data address spaces (and overlays
> to increase the I space).
> 
> I can't see Linux fitting into 128K of data space, and GCC is definitely
> out of the question. Besides, 2.11BSD already looks pretty close to 4BSD :-)

	Well said Warren.

	The D (data) space is the most severe constraint on adding any new
	feature to 2.11BSD.  Besides, as Warren mentioned, most of 4.3BSD
	as well as a few bits&pieces of 4.4 are already present.

	A couple years ago I toyed with the idea of porting over the 4.4BSD
	tty subsystem (it'd be real nice to have termios and 8bit clean
	serial line handling).   The 'struct tty' almost tripled in size!  Even
	doing major surgery and leaving out a couple less useful capabilities
	the growth in 'struct tty' exceeded what is left available in 2.11's
	kernel D space.

	Oh, I should point out the limit for the kernel's D space is even lower
	than the 64KB mentioned.  Of that 64KB the I/O page has to, of course,
	be mapped in at all times or the kernel wouldn't have access to the
	memory management registers, device registers, and so on.    Then
	the kernel has to have access to 'struct u' (the per process context
	area - part of the address space is also where the kernel stack is
	kept).  So, 64 - 8 - 8 = 48.   The kernel has a total of 48KB of
	data space to use.  

	There are a few "tricks" that are played.   Some data structures are
	allocated external to the kernel's D space.  That data is mapped in
	as needed.   Slows things down of course since it does take a number
	of instructions to save the current memory manangement status, change it
	to access the external data, fetch the data, restore the mmu registers.
	Things such as the 4.3BSD disc quota system were implemented this way.

	There is at the present time an absolute maximum on the size of the
	I (instruction/text) space of 56K + (15*8)KB or 176KB (base segment of
	56KB and 15 overlays of 8KB each.  At present, depending on how many
	drivers and so on are configured, about 9 or 10 overlays are used to
	build a 2.11 kernel.   The actual limit of kernel size that can be
	booted is a bit lower due to how the boot process functions - in order
	to simplify the memory manangement during booting the boot code 
	relocates to 192KB.   The sum of the kernel text plus initialized data
	(but not the .bss segment) can not exceed 192KB or the boot code will
	be overwritten.   Another complicating factor comes from UMR (Unibus
	Mapping Registers) handling - if the boot code ever runs above 256KB
	then UMR handling would have to be done by the boot code on UNIBUS
	machines (Qbus machines of course don't have this problem since they
	don't have UMRs to contend with).

	GCC (all of the GNU stuff actually) was written with, I believe,
	"malloc aforethought" ;)   It's outright hostile to 16 bit machines.

	There might be a few bytes free to add a feature or two to 2.11BSD
	but much more than that would mean a lot of work to come up with some
	free D space for the data structures that would be needed.

	Cheers,
	Steven Schultz
	sms at 2bsd.com

[TUHS] Other operating systems on the PDP-11

[Warren Toomey]

In article by Greg 'groggy' Lehey:
> Has anyone successfully gotten, say, NetBSD, or anything along the lines of the
> > 4.4 series to run on a PDP-11?
> 
> The big issue is address space.  It's difficult enough shoehorning
> 2.11BSD onto the PDP-11.  It's well-nigh impossible to retrofit 32 bit
> operating systems.  But Steven M. Schulz will doubtless give you a
> better explanation.
> Greg

More specifically, the issue is data space. Using overlays, you can
have a process with more than 64Kbytes of instruction space on a PDP-11,
but the maximum data space that a process can have is 64Kbytes.

The kernel is in a similar situation, but with some PDP-11 models
there is kernel mode and supervisor mode, giving you two separate
64Kbytes instruction + 64Kbytes data address spaces (and overlays
to increase the I space).

I can't see Linux fitting into 128K of data space, and GCC is definitely
out of the question. Besides, 2.11BSD already looks pretty close to 4BSD :-)

	Warren

[TUHS] Other operating systems on the PDP-11

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Sunday,  7 July 2002 at 22:53:46 -0400, Gregg C Levine wrote:
> Hello from Gregg C Levine
> I've got a question for those of you, who work more in that field then I.Has
> anyone successfully gotten, say, NetBSD, or anything along the lines of the
> 4.4 series to run on a PDP-11? Granted I don't think it would work there,
> because of the way its hardware was constructed. Or for that matter, say
> Linux? Since the Simh collection builds easily on Linux, I was thinking that
> it would be relatively simple to do so.

The big issue is address space.  It's difficult enough shoehorning
2.11BSD onto the PDP-11.  It's well-nigh impossible to retrofit 32 bit
operating systems.  But Steven M. Schulz will doubtless give you a
better explanation.

Greg
--
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key
See complete headers for address and phone numbers

[TUHS] Other operating systems on the PDP-11

[Gregg C Levine]

Hello from Gregg C Levine
I've got a question for those of you, who work more in that field then I.Has
anyone successfully gotten, say, NetBSD, or anything along the lines of the
4.4 series to run on a PDP-11? Granted I don't think it would work there,
because of the way its hardware was constructed. Or for that matter, say
Linux? Since the Simh collection builds easily on Linux, I was thinking that
it would be relatively simple to do so.
Gregg C Levine drwho8 at worldnet.att.net
"How many floors does this TARDIS of yours have, anyway?"