[TUHS] Unix v6 problem with /tmp

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

That is exactly how its was done.   In fact, DEC made a Solid State Disk
(out of RAM) just for UNIX that people used to use for /tmp.


Also to be fair, Dennis did symlinks before 4.2.   They were part of the V8
I believe.  I remember talking to him and Steve Bourne about them and ideas
in the FS.  Dennis's basic thesis was that while UNIX had a typed file
system, he & Ken intentionally kept the number of types very very small.
 The problem he was afraid of what that too many systems had ended up so
many different ways to handle things.    Just keep everything as a ASCII
text file and let the user space deal with it.   Symlinks, or "late name
binding" for the FS was a mixed bag.    Just as Dennis predicted, Solaris
was an example of an implementation that went symlink happy.

I created Conditionally Dependant Symlinks (CDSL) which I think only showed
up in Masscomp's RTU, Stellix and Tru64.   The were not only late binding,
but added the concept of a user settable context.   Very handy when trying
to create a "single system image" from multiple system.   I miss them today
from Linux clusters and even put them back into one of my systems.   B


Also, around the same time that Dennis added symlinks, Apollo's Aegis (aka
Domain) guys came up with a cool idea where you can run application code
from a link - extensible types.    I remember talking to Dennis and Ken
about them at a SOSP IIRC, and toyed with putting them into one of the
Locus UNIX Kernels.   We proposed it for HP-UX and Tru64, but never got
funded to try it, although I think / believe others did some where else.



On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 4:31 PM, William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mark Longridge wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > My root partition for Unix v6 is almost full and /dev/rk0 only has 83
> blocks.
> >
> > The trouble is I wanted to compile bc.y and I think it needs around
> > 300 blocks of temporary space. I was wondering if there was a way to
> > set up Unix v6 so that it could use one of the other drives for tmp
> > space. I tried to set up a link using ln but it seems I can't link
> > across filesystems.
> >
> > The exact error is "26: Intermediate file error".
> >
> > I managed to rearrange things so that /dev/rk0 had over 300 blocks of
> > free space and it fixed the problem, but I'm curious if there was
> > another solution.
> >
> > Mark
> Ah the good old days before BSD's symlinks.
> Only thing I can think of is add another drive or partition and mount it
> as /tmp.
>
>
> Bill
>
>
>
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