[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Seth Morabito]

After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

-Seth
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[William Cheswick]

I never saw it. I believe the answer is no. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 24, 2018, at 11:13 AM, Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:
> 
> After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
> 
> -Seth
> -- 
>  Seth Morabito
>  Poulsbo, WA
>  web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> ...
> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of
> Bell Labs.
>
I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced you to
buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had bought the one we
had a Stellar otherwise).
The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the behavior
of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...

The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came out
around the same time, so it was just not interesting - *i.e.* 'JAWS' - Just
another work station' and it did not have a display.  IIRC, it was a server
and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
kicked butt
and were cheaper
.   The MIPS chip would emerge
with lots of designs,
and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
, too.

I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the
previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other
issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them
special - compared to everyone else.

The only 'successful' product
that I
can
remember that used the WE32100
was the
second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
was 68000 IIRC).  Does anyone know of another product?  I think I was told
the 5ESS
changed
 the SLICs
design
from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.

Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example of
AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, but it
was not clear it was worth it.   BTW: around the same time both AT&T and HP
were making their own DRAM too.  It was common thinking in management at
tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 'vertically
integrated.'  But in the case of both HP and AT&T there internally produced
DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market cost; so besides the
investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a pretty expensive insurance
policy.

That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second
source.'   Chip manufacturers would be required to license their designs to
some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's second source).   I
think HP was using a second source license for their memory, but IIRC AT&T
had developed its own because they had higher reliability standards.

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 12:06:22PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> IIRC, it was a server
> and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
> Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
> kicked butt and were cheaper

I dunno that they kicked butt, my memory is we were all playing leapfrog.
People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking 
about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the 
CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home 
about.  SPARC was sort of like that too, it was better but it was 
really really rare to have a chip that was 2x faster than its peers,
if that happened it was usually the introduction of one CPU generation
compared to the tail of another CPUs generation.

> The only 'successful' product that I can remember that used the WE32100
> was the second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
> was 68000 IIRC).  

Ah, the BLIT.  Pretty sure Wisconsin's CS department had the first generation
(aren't those the ones that caught on fire?).  I *loved* those terminals,
so much nicer than a single screen.

BTW, I had Greg Chesson here for a pig roast once, and he brought Bart.
I've got pics somewhere if anyone cares.

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Jon Forrest]

On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
> about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the
> CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
> about.  

When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.

(You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)

Jon

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 10:54:41AM -0700, Jon Forrest wrote:
> On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
> >about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the
> >CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
> >about.
> 
> When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
> followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.

2106A 275Mhz

> (You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
> at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
> one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)

I don't remember a lot of stuff, I'm old.  Old enough to get the joke that
when you are 25 and you open the fridge and ask "what am I doing here?"
it is existential question.  When you are my age and you open the fridge
and ask the same question it's because you forgot what you wanted.

That said, I do have some memory of going somewhere, but UCB?  I thought
Carl was at HP Labs?  But I do remember going somewhere.

And all these years later Carl and I are still close friends.  It is
a small world.  

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Mary Ann Horton]

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Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to 
use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the 
externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 
1980s.  We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told 
"eat your own dog food." The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had 
potential.  Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide 
turned in favor of Suns.


On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com 
> <mailto:web@loomcom.com>> wrote:
>
>     ...
>     I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
>     inside of Bell Labs.
>
> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced 
> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had 
> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).
> The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the 
> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS /etc/...
>
> The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came 
> out around the same time, so it was just not interesting - /i.e./ 
> 'JAWS' - Just another work station' and it did not have a display.  
> IIRC, it was a server and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for 
> that use.
> Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed 
> out, kicked butt
> and were cheaper
> .   The MIPS chip would emerge
> with lots of designs,
> and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
> , too.
>
> I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the 
> previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other 
> issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them 
> special - compared to everyone else.
>
> The only 'successful' product
> that I
> can
> rememberthat used the WE32100
> was the
> second version (/a.k.a./product version) of the Blit (Bart's first 
> version was 68000 IIRC).  Does anyone know of another product?  I 
> think I was told the 5ESS
> changed
>  the SLICs
> design
> from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
> longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.
>
> Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example 
> of AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, 
> but it was not clear it was worth it.   BTW: around the same time both 
> AT&T and HP were making their own DRAM too.  It was common thinking in 
> management at tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 
> 'vertically integrated.'  But in the case of both HP and AT&T there 
> internally produced DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market 
> cost; so besides the investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a 
> pretty expensive insurance policy.
>
> That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second 
> source.'   Chip manufacturers would be required to license their 
> designs to some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's 
> second source).   I think HP was using a second source license for 
> their memory, but IIRC AT&T had developed its own because they had 
> higher reliability standards.


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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Seth Morabito]

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On Mon, Aug 27, 2018, at 8:54 AM, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to
> use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the
> externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-
> late 1980s.  We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were
> told "eat your own dog food."  The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the
> 3B2 had potential.  Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs
> the tide turned in favor of Suns.> 
> On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito
>> <web@loomcom.com> wrote:>>> 
>>> ...
>>> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside
>>> of Bell Labs.>> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced
>> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had
>> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).>> The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the
>> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...[...]

Thank you all for your many replies!

I have a soft spot for the 3B2 because I've put so much work into
reverse engineering it and understanding it, but I can absolutely
understand why everyone wanted Suns. The 3B2 was a funny architecture,
and unless it had been a breakout hit right from the start, I can't
imagine a path that would have led to 3B2s taking over the world.
-Seth
--
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com




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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use
> AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
> developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s.  We
> all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
> food."
>
That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and Kolstad
made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody (ber
probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
amsussed.

The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
>
It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that they were nothing special -
too little too late.   The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk.   As I said, fighting the last
war.

The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
compete with the builtin graphics.   For the former, did the 3B2 only run
SRV3 and SRV4?   The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD.  By
SVR3 the OS finally got better.    BILT had some great stuff, but I think
the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.



> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in favor
> of Suns
>
Although by the time of its release, the default system for

SRV4 was Wintel.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[John P. Linderman]

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We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
worth.

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> below...
>
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:
>
>> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use
>> AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
>> developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s.  We
>> all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
>> food."
>>
> That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and
> Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody
> (ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
> amsussed.
>
> The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
>>
> It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that they were nothing special -
> too little too late.   The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
> starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
> room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
> Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk.   As I said, fighting the last
> war.
>
> The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
> behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
> compete with the builtin graphics.   For the former, did the 3B2 only run
> SRV3 and SRV4?   The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD.  By
> SVR3 the OS finally got better.    BILT had some great stuff, but I think
> the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
> on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.
>
>
>
>> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in
>> favor of Suns
>>
> Although by the time of its release, the default system for
>
> SRV4 was Wintel.
>
> Clem
>

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Brad Spencer]

"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> writes:

> We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
> series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
> for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
> it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
> prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
> worth.

[snip]


I was at 6200 Broad Street in Reynoldsburg in the late 1990s to early
2000s and while the group I was a part of was not forced to use the 3B
series for our product, we did get forced into using GIS [a.k.a. NCR]
systems after NCR was purchased.  The OS running on it was some sort of
SVR4, pretty vanilla, if I recall correctly.  I just remember it being
buggy.  That version of the product was sold to a single domestic US
customer.  All of the rest of the domestic customers waited for the
HP-UX port which happened after it was obvious no one wanted the NCR
product.  The product that I was a part of was old even at the time,
having been ported to the VAX [SVR3], test ported to SunOS 4.x, Tandem
and the AT&T rebranded variation [SVR3, and SVR4], GIS [SVR4] and HP
[HP-UX, lots of versions].  I have heard since that the product is still
around and runs on Linux at this point.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Mon, 27 Aug 2018, Clem Cole wrote:

> That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and 
> Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody 
> (ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were 
> not amsussed.

I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a 
PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my 
SparcStation.

Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile 
and pretending that I liked it...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile and
> pretending that I liked it...

I don't think anyone really liked it.  Maybe Roger Faulkner.  And there
are the Joyent crew.  Even they, when I told them I had tried it and
wasn't impressed, asked if I had /opt/GNU/bin in my path first?  Huh?
Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning to the
compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?  SunOS was the system that everyone
used because they wanted to, Solaris was what people used because they
had to.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning [sic] to the
> compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?

As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.

> SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
> was what people used because they had to.

Nicely put!

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[George Michaelson]

we pretty much bounced a UNISYS library information system on using
',' (comma) as the separator on IPv4 dotted-quads. If there isn't a
dot, how can it be one?

I think the OS I used with a cd command which could walk down, but
walking "up" was a cd to root and a walk down -1 also fell out of
favour.

The only thing I remember doing on the apollo domain workstations was
tuning their sendmail config. nobody ran commands on it, nobody could
reliably compile.

HP and its HP compatibility library. and the really badly written BSD
compatibility layer.

oddly, OSF/1 and RS/6000 AIX both survived. maybe you can have enough
lipstick on a pig. reboot to re-apply bindings. well i *guess* that
works, but gee, was it really so hard to move shared library through
some staging process? and having to boot into a mini OS to do
filesystem repairs. please.

none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 4:02 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning [sic] to the
> > compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?
>
> As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
> of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.
>
> > SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
> > was what people used because they had to.
>
> Nicely put!
>
> Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:

> none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.

This goes back to Clem's argument about economics. The increasing power
and declining cost of Intel HW combined with the _almost_ neglible cost
of Linux combined to kill off almost all the legacy Unixes.

That Linux modelled many things after SunOS also helped.

But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 8/28/2018 2:42 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

If you haven't tried Solaris 11, at least 11.2 or later, check it out. A 
lot of GNU stuff is available, and you can "pkg install" apache, tomcat, 
PHP, MYSQL, and a slew of other things that are actually being kept up 
to date. The recent PHP 7.1.17 exploit fix was put out in the regular 
Solaris 11 SRU a few weeks after it was publicly released. And that was 
supposedly after the "mass layoff" of Solaris engineers. I've also 
noticed quite a few bug fixes for Solaris internals and device drivers 
since then so Oracle is still maintaining Solaris. I think their most 
recent support time line puts Solaris support out to 2030 or so.

I've installed and maintain a few Solaris 11.1 (since upgraded to 11.3) 
clusters for Oracle databases on Intel (Dell) blades with fiber channel, 
and with ZFS they've been rock-solid.

Side note, and I probably already said this a long time ago here, but 
back in the early days of Linux kernel 2.6, I complained on one of the 
mailing lists about the removal of a way to control the size of the disk 
cache, along with the tendency for the kernel to page out applications 
in favor of more disk cache. The snobby answer I got back from a 
developer was that (paraphrased) "We know better than you about memory 
allocation" or some such garbage. I've always turned my nose up at Linux 
since then. I figure if that level of arrogance had infested it to that 
degree, and an open-source project at that, I wanted no part of it. 
Since then, of course, they have made some changes that make it less 
likely to do that, but I have a recent Oracle Linux (Redhat) system here 
running Oracle eBusiness that is currently 2GB into swap, and has 10G of 
disk cache. Swappiness is set to 0, and other tunables were altered that 
should have stopped that. That's just plain dumb.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and 
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting 
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever 
tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and 
> > Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting 
> > big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
>
> Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever 
> tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).
>
> -- Dave

That's exactly what happened to me, at the same age.  Fortunately the
market where I live (Israel) is super hot for C++ / Linux developers,
and I landed a job at what so far is a reasonable start-up company.
("Praise the Lord", as they say.)

I hope you've found something.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

[...]

>> SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris 
>> was what people used because they had to.
>
> Nicely put!

Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
penguins have broken this time).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Harald Arnesen]

Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:

> Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> penguins have broken this time).

So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?
-- 
Hilsen Harald

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 02:36:47AM +0200, Harald Arnesen wrote:
> Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:
> 
> > Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> > sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> > at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> > BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> > penguins have broken this time).
> 
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

MacOS is based on Mach and Mach was a big steaming mess of promises that
were not so much.  Easy for me to say, I haven't written a VM system from
scratch and they did, so credit them for that.  But I've been in a VM
system that was oh so much easier to read and understand, the SunOS 4.x
VM system done by Joe Moran (mojo@sun.com).  That guy had crazy skills,
well beyond mine or anyone else I can think of.  When he quit the story
is that Bill Joy stopped him in the parking lot and offered him crazy
amounts of money to stay.

So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.

The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.

[TUHS] SunOS code?

[arnold]

Changed the subject line.

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
>
> The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.

So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.

Just a thought,

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

Sun never open sourced it.

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Changed the subject line.
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> >
> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> 
> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> 
> Just a thought,
> 
> Arnold

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Dan Cross]

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I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Sun never open sourced it.
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
> wasn't
> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > >
> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> >
> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> >
> > Just a thought,
> >
> > Arnold
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[William Pechter]

Didn't they un-open Solaris 11?

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:42
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Sun never open sourced it.
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
> wasn't
> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > >
> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> >
> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> >
> > Just a thought,
> >
> > Arnold
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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They didn't release the sources to Solaris 11. Anything released prior,
though, remains free.

Warner

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:44 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com> wrote:

> Didn't they un-open Solaris 11?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
> To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
> Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
> Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:42
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?
>
> I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
> code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
> for historical examination.
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > Sun never open sourced it.
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > Changed the subject line.
> > >
> > > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not
> impressed.
> > > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
> > wasn't
> > > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > > >
> > > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> > >
> > > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> > >
> > > Just a thought,
> > >
> > > Arnold
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> > http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
> >
>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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The problem is finding some at Oracle that would care and finding a proper
distribution tape to officially release.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:42 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
> code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
> for historical examination.
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> Sun never open sourced it.
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > Changed the subject line.
>> >
>> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
>> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not
>> impressed.
>> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
>> wasn't
>> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
>> > >
>> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
>> >
>> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
>> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
>> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
>> >
>> > Just a thought,
>> >
>> > Arnold
>>
>> --
>> ---
>> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
>> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>>
>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Changed the subject line.
>
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> >
> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
>
> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
>

The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.

SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.

There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
it would be far from a drop-in.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:43 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>> Changed the subject line.
>>
>> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
>> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
>> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
>> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
>> >
>> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
>>
>> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
>> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
>> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
>>
>
> The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
>
> SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
> The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
> incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
>
> There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
> benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
> better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
> the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
> it would be far from a drop-in.
>

Also, a huge difference is that there's *NO* MP support for SunOS.
Solbourne produced OS/MP which was SunOS with fine-grained locking added (I
forget the degree to which it was, but IIRC, there were 'funnels' that used
locks around the different subsystems (so not one big giant lock), not
fine-grained in the sense we use it today. *THAT* source is harder to find
online...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 08:43:09AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> 
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > >
> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> >
> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> >
> 
> The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
> 
> SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
> The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
> incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
> 
> There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
> benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
> better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
> the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
> it would be far from a drop-in.

The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.  
Everything else seems like a mess to me.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Steve Mynott]

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On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>

That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.

I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.

I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
or so.

I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.

S

-- 
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Andy Kosela]

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On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
>> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
>> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
>> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
>> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>>
>
> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>
> I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
> which did have problems at first.
>
> I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
> or so.
>
> I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
> has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
>
>

Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.

Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All three
had exceptional coding skills.

--Andy

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
>>> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
>>> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
>>> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
>>> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>>>
>>
>> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
>> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>>
>> I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
>> which did have problems at first.
>>
>
Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.


> I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
>> or so.
>>
>
It used to be downright aweful.


> I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
>> has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
>>
>
OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.


> Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
> the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
>
> Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All three
> had exceptional coding skills.
>

With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
has done well with DragonFly, however.

In the last 10 years or so there's been a number of people that have
stepped up and replaced them, most notably Allan Cox and Mark Johnston who
have mad coding skills and can play well with others. Though I'm sure I'm
slighting several people by not mentioning them.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Andy Kosela]

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On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
>>>> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
>>>> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
>>>> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
>>>> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>>>>
>>>
>>> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
>>> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>>>
>>> I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
>>> which did have problems at first.
>>>
>>
> Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
> awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
> BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
> involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
> quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.
>
>
>> I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
>>> or so.
>>>
>>
> It used to be downright aweful.
>
>
>> I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
>>> has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
>>>
>>
> OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.
>
>
>> Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
>> the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
>>
>> Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All
>> three had exceptional coding skills.
>>
>
> With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
> were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
> didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
> contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
> rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
> drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
> show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
> work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
> has done well with DragonFly, however.
>

Well, there are certainly as many sides to this story as there are people
involved.  Same with NetBSD/OpenBSD split.  Let's leave it as that as I
don't believe we have mentioned people on this list so they can't defend
themselves.

--Andy

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
> > would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
> > rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> > focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> > Everything else seems like a mess to me.
> >
> 
> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.

I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently.  Perhaps I'm just old and
tired but it looked pretty messy to me.  Still Mach based and the
Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
VM system, doesn't remotely compare.  Sun had some exceptional
talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 9:01 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
> > > would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
> > > rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> > > focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> > > Everything else seems like a mess to me.
> > >
> >
> > That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> > thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>
> I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently.  Perhaps I'm just old and
> tired but it looked pretty messy to me.  Still Mach based and the
> Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
> VM system, doesn't remotely compare.  Sun had some exceptional
> talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
> group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.
>

It is still technically mach based, but it's fixed most of the scalability
issues Mach had (and that MacOS still has).

There's much clutter in the VM, and there's areas that could stand to be
rewritten, or to get at least a good cleaning.

The SunOS vm was far superior in its day, and likely is still cleaner than
what's in FreeBSD. But it can't scale like FreeBSD's vm (or NetBSD's or
even MacOS's) because it hasn't had the same care and feeding for the last
25 years. It's still single threaded and hasn't had the care and feeding to
make it perform well in MP situations. Solbourne spent years hacking it to
make it scale better, but even with 16 processors that was the high end for
them, and they were barely 10x faster than a uniprocessor for many work
loads due, in part, to vm contention limiting scalability. We had 2 8 CPU
machines that could build our software ~20% faster (with netmake) than the
1 16 CPU machine the OS group had, for example... I recall many discussions
with Dave Barak who did the fine-grained work on the 4.0 SunOS kernel
complaining about how many of the clever tricks in different subsystems
that worked great on UP were terrible for MP...

I don't doubt we'd be in an even better place today if we'd started with
the SunOS vm system in 4.4BSD rather than mach. Don't get me wrong. And
I'll not be the first in line to defend its elegance or clarity of design
(in fact, it has many design issues that took a decade to recode to
properly scale, and we're still not done). And lord knows even though I'm
not close to the foremost expert in the vm, I could easily put together an
hour or two talk on how all the areas of the VM that are holding us back.
Yet even with all that, I think that the ugly, warty, co-evolved code we
have in FreeBSD performs better than the SunOS vm code on any objective
benchmark you could have.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Steve Mynott]

There is a paper on the SunOS 4 VM available at

<https://web.archive.org/web/20000817230720/http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps>

(for some reason I always forget the ghostview binary is actually called
gv the rare time I use it!)

Some basic grepping suggests at least some of the tags in the paper were
still in use in Open Solaris at:

<https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/uts/common/vm>

There is a paper on UVM as well.

<https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor/cranor.pdf>

This says the original 4.4BSD Mach VM suffered from "swap memory leak
deadlock" and claims of its sibling (at least in 1999) that although the
FreeBSD VM is improved that "it still suffers from the object chaining
model it inherited".

The FreeBSD VM was documented before 2013 in

<https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/article.html>

"Much of the apparent complexity of the FreeBSD design, especially in
the VM/Swap subsystem, is a direct result of having to solve serious
performance issues that occur under various conditions."

-- 
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

All of those papers are here:

http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/
	SunOS.nvram.pdf
	SunOS.shlib.pdf
	SunOS.smoosh.pdf
	SunOS.tfs.pdf
	SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
	SunOS.vfs_arch.pdf
	SunOS.vm_arch.pdf
	SunOS.vm_impl.pdf

If you have pointers to a paper that is Sun related that I don't have 
I'd like to see that.

> <https://web.archive.org/web/20000817230720/http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps>
> 
> There is a paper on UVM as well.
> 
> <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor/cranor.pdf>

That's interesting, reading.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[David Arnold]

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> On 30 Aug 2018, at 00:43, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com <mailto:arnold@skeeve.com>> wrote:
> Changed the subject line.
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
> 
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> >
> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> 
> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> 
> The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.

I found both 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) and 4.1.3 (which still has the m68k, sun2, and sun3 bits in it).

It’d be quite fun to walk through Bill & Lynne Jolitz’ Dr Dobbs 386BSD articles but with one of these as the starting point.




d

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Harald Arnesen wrote:

>> Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a 
>> shit sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like 
>> systems at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least 
>> vaguely BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see 
>> what the penguins have broken this time).
>
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo 
serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy 
driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).

And vice-versa; I had to learn how to control DTR etc on a genuine
serial port on the FreeBSD box (I am writing a user-level driver for
a serial device).

As for Penguin/OS (and trying to figure out just which header file uses 
which flags, when I'm using low-level Perl I/O), then forget it.

What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on 
Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.

I had a look at how they (Linux) wrote stty.c, and nearly threw up.

So, yes, that's pretty much my answer...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> 
> What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
> Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.

I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly
late innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
user interface.

In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:

	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0

Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type?  :-)

					- Ted

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:23:10PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> 
> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
> type?  :-)

This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.

	Warren

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:

> This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
> "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.

Last week I typed "crontab -" (missed the "e" for -e)  and then without 
realizing what happened Ctrl-C didn't work, typed Ctrl-D.  Argh. Lost 
around 20 crontabs which were in a directory I didn't backup. Luckily I 
had a syslog file with my recent jobs to recreate it, but lost all my 
comments and commented-out entries (for over ten years).

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:

> This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping 
> "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.

Hands up all those who have *not* done that...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 08/29/2018 04:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...

My faux pas is usually meaning to type "telinit q" but reaching a bit 
too far and accidnetally typing "telinit 1".

*facepalm*

/me starts the (not so) slow walk of shame to the DC.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services and Oracle on AIX.

Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in the future.
I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't adjacent.

Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 18:09
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

On 08/29/2018 04:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...

My faux pas is usually meaning to type "telinit q" but reaching a bit 
too far and accidnetally typing "telinit 1".

*facepalm*

/me starts the (not so) slow walk of shame to the DC.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an 
> IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services 
> and Oracle on AIX.

@^*% happens.

Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.

> Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis 
> for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in 
> the future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't 
> adjacent.

I remember things like that.

I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that 
it fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me 
and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word, 
primarily because of that established trust.

> Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and 
> dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.

Nice.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 05:04:48PM -0600, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> >Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis for
> >the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in the
> >future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
> >adjacent.
> 
> I remember things like that.
> 
> I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that it
> fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me and
> told them that something was not me and they took me at my word, primarily
> because of that established trust.

Yep, I'm the same way and I think most good to stellar engineers are the
same way.  How can you fix your stuff if you are in denial about it being
broken.

And I agree with you Grant, on the trust building.  Customers love it 
when you are honest.

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

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The only time I hid something like that was back in my Field Service days.

I smoked a third party data comm board which cost $$$$ while trying to
replace it.
DEC had me do something for one of my customers on a third party hardware
install.   I had no docs, training or experience with the board.
Unfortunately, the vendor didn't key a power cable and I flipped the damned
two pin wire blowing the chip top right off the board.

Wasn't sure it was my fault.  I stayed with the call until they got another
board and they got the box up and running and I finally figured I was the
cause
of the issue.  Didn't volunteer the info since I wasn't sure.   Probably
should've taken the hit.  When I did the bad thing I took the hit.

One of these was shorting +15v (IIRC) to Init L on the Unibus on an
11/780.  Blew the bits off all the boards back to the Unibus termination on
the DW780
and out to the M9302 Unibus terminator.

Spent the next two days rebuilding the box.
I still had a great relationship with the customer for the next 4 years at
the site.

People understand mistakes and will forgive.  Lying to a customer to keep
up a corporate image will never be forgotten if you get caught.

I remember stealing HDA's off of brand new RA81's at DEC's Princeton HQ to
get them out to customer sites before failures in the field from the glue
liquification issue.
Customers will stand by a company that puts them first and delivers serious
effort.
Nowadays the outsourced techs are pretty much parts carriers and swappers
with no ability to push company deliveries up and often they act as a
delaying action until the
company can deliver the correct services.

Bill


--
  d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
 pechter-at-gmail.com


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:05 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> > Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an
> > IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services
> > and Oracle on AIX.
>
> @^*% happens.
>
> Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.
>
> > Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis
> > for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in
> > the future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
> > adjacent.
>
> I remember things like that.
>
> I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that
> it fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me
> and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word,
> primarily because of that established trust.
>
> > Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and
> > dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.
>
> Nice.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Dan Mick]

On 08/29/2018 03:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
> 
>> This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
>> "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
> 
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
> 
> -- Dave

<raises hand>

I always type signal names.  Life's too short to worry about saving
three characters.

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 08/29/2018 04:31 PM, Dan Mick wrote:
> I always type signal names.  Life's too short to worry about saving 
> three characters.

Signal names?  I've always used numbers / quit.  I don't think I've ever 
seen anybody do otherwise.

/me goes to read the man page.

Thank you for the pro tip Dan.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:

> Signal names?  I've always used numbers / quit.  I don't think I've ever 
> seen anybody do otherwise.

I've never used signal names (other than SIGTERM, when it got changed from 
14 to 15 for no good reason that I could see; at least it's now the 
default signal).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[ron]

I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember what
the mnemonics are.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:04 PM
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
> 
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
> 
> > This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
> > "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
> 
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
> 
> -- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[John P. Linderman]

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I remember doing a fresh install of unix on a VAX with another sysadmin. We
had spent a couple hours getting everything ready to go, and he had created
a bunch of temporary directories under /tmp to hold intermediate work. All
started with ".", so, in /tmp, he entered "rm -r .*". Unfortunately, that
matched .. as well. We knew something had gone very wrong when we got a
"/bin/rm: text busy" message as rm tried to remove itself.

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:06 AM, <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
> the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember
> what
> the mnemonics are.
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:04 PM
> > To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
> >
> > On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
> >
> > > This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
> > > "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
> >
> > Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
> >
> > -- Dave
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:07 AM <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
> the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember
> what
> the mnemonics are.
>
Same here - there first time I saw the mnemonics were in the built-in kill
command in csh.    Which was usefule for "kill -cont"

but to this day, since like Ron I grew on fifth/sixth/seventh edition which
used numbers, the ones that I remember and care about are screwed into my
fingers.

I never have an issue with -1 vs -9 with kill, but I do not have great
story about how as a young engineer I wiped out the life's work of visiting
professor because Tektronix had the 0 and 1 keys next to each other on one
of the terminals they made.  It was the console of our 11/60 and we had two
RK05's and I fat fingured /dev/r...0 instead of 1.  Bad stuff.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

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At least in the old days drives had Write Protect switches.
Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette and leaving off Write Protect on hard disks.  Some disks had write protect jumpers on the boards... They should have been The STANDARD.

Bill

⁣Sent from BlueMail ​

On Aug 30, 2018, 09:25, at 09:25, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:07 AM <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
>> I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't
>take
>> the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to
>remember
>> what
>> the mnemonics are.
>>
>Same here - there first time I saw the mnemonics were in the built-in
>kill
>command in csh.    Which was usefule for "kill -cont"
>
>but to this day, since like Ron I grew on fifth/sixth/seventh edition
>which
>used numbers, the ones that I remember and care about are screwed into
>my
>fingers.
>
>I never have an issue with -1 vs -9 with kill, but I do not have great
>story about how as a young engineer I wiped out the life's work of
>visiting
>professor because Tektronix had the 0 and 1 keys next to each other on
>one
>of the terminals they made.  It was the console of our 11/60 and we had
>two
>RK05's and I fat fingured /dev/r...0 instead of 1.  Bad stuff.
>
>Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com> wrote:

> At least in the old days drives had Write Protect switches.
>
Not the issue - both disks were RW.  I was running as root and ran a
program that lacked a check it shoud have had it (because I was lazy and
never put it in there).



> Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette
>
You of course realized that was because of field service issues of course.
 Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using a twist
in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the jumpers
properly.




> and leaving off Write Protect on hard disks.  Some disks had write protect
> jumpers on the boards...
>
Hmmm.. I thought all disks at least had a strap.   WD, CDC, Seagate,
Shuggart, Toshiba all supported the strap.  The IBM disks I remember did
not also, but I'll take your word for it, it would have been like them to
have removed it to save the connector cost.




> They should have been The STANDARD.
>
Hmmm.. I'm not at home, but I think I have both the ST-412/506 and ESDI
specs in a filing cab somewhere.  I thought the standard did defined it.
(Intel blocks 'bitsavers.org' for some reason so I can not look online but
I think  http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/seagate/ST412_OEMmanual_Apr82.pdf is
likely to have it in there).

Clem

>

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette
>>
> You of course realized that was because of field service issues of
> course.   Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using
> a twist in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the
> jumpers properly.
>

 Ah yes, the original zeroconfig :)

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

Early plug and play.

Would have worked better if they trained the PC techs in how the stuff worked.

Bill
Old ex-tech turned sysadmin


-----Original Message-----
From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc: William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Sent: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 11:22
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette
>>
> You of course realized that was because of field service issues of
> course.   Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using
> a twist in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the
> jumpers properly.
>

 Ah yes, the original zeroconfig :)

Warner

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>
>> What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
>> Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.
>
> I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly
> late innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
> user interface.
>
> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0

Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
(along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

But options are an issue, notably with GNU software, which has a
completely different lineage.  Just look at FreeBSD ls(1) and GNU
ls(1).

> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
> type?  :-)

Creeping featurism!

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> >
> > 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> 
> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
> sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)

Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
1992 at the latest.

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.

    	      	      	       	     	- Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> > >
> > >     stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> >
> > Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> > (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
> > sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> > I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>
> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>
> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
> 1992 at the latest.
>

I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented in Net/2
(1991, though of course the entanglements there have been discussed), but
the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to be absent from the man
page).

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
> teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
> from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
> 4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.
>

I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
"Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
Solaris.

        - Dan C.

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.

I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
> 
> I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
> on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
> AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
> macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.

I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
running AOS.  Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
few years ahead of me.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/29/18 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>
>>> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>>
>> I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
>> on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
>> AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
>> macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.
> 
> I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
> to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
> running AOS.  Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
> from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
> few years ahead of me.

Yep, they did. I maintained a custom kernel version for quite a long time,
but that computer is not one of the things that came along when we moved.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arno Griffioen]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.

Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's. 

The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with 
using an assembler :)

Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!

							Bye, Arno.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Eric Wayte]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen@ieee.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>
> Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
>
> The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
> using an assembler :)
>
> Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
>
>                                                         Bye, Arno.
>

I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
RT back in the 80s.
-- 
Eric Wayte

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
I remember meeting the RT family of machines during the UNIXEXPO cycle
of events. Also what DEC was up to. It was both the IBM 6151 RT
machines and finally the odd looking design that they turned into. I
still have the mouse pad they gave me of a certain Viking working to
promote them.

I recall that the sales droid at the collection of RT machines was
rather vexed that I simply used the telnet command to walk my way
across the whole series.

I also recall that I was more impressed by the DEC crowd, and was
amused by the SUN efforts. You're right as usual Larry, they were
working too <DELETED> hard to promote themselves.

Kevin I've seen your site before, it is as informative as usual.

As for running AIX in a virtual machine, perhaps I will contact you
off list to discuss that idea, Kevin.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Eric Wayte <ewayte@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen@ieee.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
>> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>>
>> Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
>>
>> The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
>> using an assembler :)
>>
>> Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
>>
>>                                                         Bye, Arno.
>
>
> I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
> RT back in the 80s.
> --
> Eric Wayte

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
> "Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
> Solaris.

AOS was used by MIT's Project Athena.  DEC and IBM both contributed $5
million/year in staff or equipment, while MIT contributed $2
million/year.  So Athena was funded at $12 million for five years,
which was later extended by another 3 years.

Initially the DEC and IBM equipment was running on BSD 4.3/4.3 Tahoe.
DEC later moved us to Ultrix, and IBM to AIX (sigh).

Sun equipment was later added to the mix (purchased and funded by MIT).

   	       	       	     	       - Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Wednesday, 29 August 2018 at 10:41:02 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>>> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
>>>> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>>>>
>>>>     stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>>>
>>> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
>>> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
>>> sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
>>> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>>
>> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>>
>> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
>> 1992 at the latest.

Right, which is why I wrote

  I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

In case that wasn't clear, I meant a later date than 4.3BSD.

> I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> be absent from the man page).

No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:

  static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c	5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";

And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.

Greg
--
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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> > I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> > in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> > discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> > be absent from the man page).
>
> No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
> I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
> FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:
>
>   static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c    5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";
>
> And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
> of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
> from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.
>

Net/2 was the basis of 386BSD, which begat the patchkits, which begat
FreeBSD and NetBSD.

One of the problems with early Linux was that they were just a bunch of
guys (and sometimes gals) that had access to these cool unix systems. At
the time, there was quite the lag between release by research / university
and running in a commercial Unix. So in the early 1990s, there were  a
bunch of systems based on 4.2BSD, as well as many based on System V, which
lacked the -f flag. At the time, it was at the end of the isolated phase of
Unix, where people just made stuff up in relative isolation and when the
cross pollination effects of USENET and the first Unix converts having had
a decade or so under their belts. The Linux guys weren't old-time Bell Labs
guys that would know the differences in detail between the different
strains, especially the people that were writing one-off utilities, often
to an old, out of date man page, that Linux encouraged to contribute.
Nothing wrong with all that, it was a crazy time trying to recreate things
at a mile a minute. But some details were not faithfully emulated. It's not
surprising: there was always so much to do. So while it existed when they
started, it's unlikely the knowledge had diffused enough for them to know
about it when it came time to code...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly late 
> innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's user 
> interface.

Yeah, I suppose that's it, but in true GNU style they also have 
"--file=/dev/XXX", so why not "-f"?

> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining 
> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>
> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when 
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to 
> type?  :-)

Ah, but then the shell does the opening, which might not be the mode that 
you wanted; I was doing some funky I/O redirection at the time as well.

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 29 Aug 2018, at 03:06, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).

I’m glad I’m not the only one who has infinite problems with these dongles. I have a sacred old laptop running OpenBSD precisely to get serial consoles working as a) it has an RS-232 port and b) the drivers are sane. I have a USB-serial dongle which on Mac, once the driver is installed, creates a device called /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Serial-SiLo. Took me an eternity to figure out it was that because the docs had nothing about which device file it actually created and, well, considering it is a physical cable I had eliminated Bluetooth to begin with… I confess to looking at the creation date on the device file and then saying “naah, it cannot be… oh… it is…”

I do miss SunOS too - because of a single user with great powers we had to upgrade a SparcStation 10 to Solaris back in 1994 and the performance took an instant nosedive. Not to mention the hours spent getting tools to make it actually work (i.e. 99% of the GNU project).

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a
> PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
> SparcStation.

I made a "Satan Inside" PS file once, along with a "Downgrade to Solaris"
PS file. Must dig them out ....

Cheers, Warren

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Paul Winalski]

On 8/27/18, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a
> PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
> SparcStation.

We stuck an International House of Pancakes "Powered by Pancakes"
sticker on the power supply box of our IBM mainframe.

-Paul W.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

I am pretty sure that V8 was the first research system to run on
Vaxen, and I believe that Research used 750 and later 8550s for
their systems. Norman could probably give a defnitive answer.

V7 on the Interdata aside, Plan 9 is when you saw a big push to
a multiplatform system: MIPS, SPARC, 68040 and 386.

Arnold

Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and
> emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
> inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was
> ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that
> would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>
> -Seth
> -- 
>   Seth Morabito
>   Poulsbo, WA
>   web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Norman Wilson]

Ron Natalie:

  I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
  the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember what
  the mnemonics are.

====

Me too.  And not just the kill command; the (real) shell's
trap command too.

It's all just muscle memory, not a desire to save keystrokes.

On the rare occasions when I need to send a post-modern signal
like SIGSTOP or SIGCONT, I use the name.

As an aside, why do modern kill and sh accept only the
abbreviated form of the signal name, not the full name;
e.g. kill -STOP is OK, kill -SIGSTOP an error?  When we
taught kill about that sometime in (I think) the 9th Edition
era at Research, we allowed either form.  I think it was
Doug who insisted on it, and he was right.

All this applies to shell commands, not to programs.
It is just plain wrong to code
	kill(9, pid)
in C.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/5/18 11:04 AM, Norman Wilson wrote:

> As an aside, why do modern kill and sh accept only the
> abbreviated form of the signal name, not the full name;
> e.g. kill -STOP is OK, kill -SIGSTOP an error?  

It's the standard:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/kill.html#tag_20_64

"Historical versions of kill have not written the SIG prefix for the -l
option and have not recognized the SIG prefix on signal_names."

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_28

"Implementations may also accept the names with the SIG prefix; no known
historical shell does so."

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Norman Wilson

    > It is just plain wrong to code
    >  kill(9, pid)

_All_ uses of magic numbers in numeric form are wrong!

	Noel

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[John P. Linderman]

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On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 11:44 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Norman Wilson
>
>     > It is just plain wrong to code
>     >  kill(9, pid)
>
> _All_ uses of magic numbers in numeric form are wrong!
>
>         Noel
>

I completely agree, although you can do worse. A junior programmer I worked
with at MIT wrote (in IBM assembler)

twelv dc 10

(I probably have the syntax wrong, but he was declaring the value of
symbolic name 'twelv' to be 10). I have no idea why he did this. He didn't
last long.

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Kurt H Maier]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 11:44:35AM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: Norman Wilson
> 
>     > It is just plain wrong to code
>     >  kill(9, pid)
> 
> _All_ uses of magic numbers in numeric form are wrong!
> 
> 	Noel

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_68_0/boost/utility/binary.hpp


khm