[TUHS] DG UNIX History

[TUHS] DG UNIX History

[Clem Cole]

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This recent activity on the simh mailing list WRT to DG Nova and
Ecpilse got me wondering.  At Locus in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of
work with DG and DG-UX with their later MP-based ports using commercially
available microprocessors (which I have reported was a very nicely done
system, easy to work on, the locks tended to scale well, e*tc*.).

But I am trying to remember if C or UNIX was on a Nova or an Eclipse.  This
could be my failed memory, given that so many people ported V7 in the late
1970s (the infamous 'NUIX' bug from the Series/1 port probably being my
favorite tale).  So to the hive mind, did anyone (DG themselves or a
University) ever build 16 or 32-bit tools for the DG architectures and do a
UNIX port, and if so, does anyone know what became of those efforts?  Is
this something that needs to be in the TUHS archives also?

Clem
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Larry McVoy]

I dunno.  I've heard DG did a pretty much from the ground up rewrite of
Unix to make it scale well on SMP machines.  I've never seen the source
or used DG-UX, so it's all heresay.  If anyone has more info than what
Clem said, I'm all ears.

The reason I'm interested is the original model of disabling interrupts
really isn't pleasant on an SMP but people tried to evolve it towards
something that scaled.  It seems like DG went at it starting over,
designing SMP in from the start.  Be interesting to understand what
they did.  Sequent as well.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 10:54:16AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> This recent activity on the simh mailing list WRT to DG Nova and
> Ecpilse got me wondering.  At Locus in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of
> work with DG and DG-UX with their later MP-based ports using commercially
> available microprocessors (which I have reported was a very nicely done
> system, easy to work on, the locks tended to scale well, e*tc*.).
> 
> But I am trying to remember if C or UNIX was on a Nova or an Eclipse.  This
> could be my failed memory, given that so many people ported V7 in the late
> 1970s (the infamous 'NUIX' bug from the Series/1 port probably being my
> favorite tale).  So to the hive mind, did anyone (DG themselves or a
> University) ever build 16 or 32-bit tools for the DG architectures and do a
> UNIX port, and if so, does anyone know what became of those efforts?  Is
> this something that needs to be in the TUHS archives also?
> 
> Clem
> ???

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[arnold]

I'm pretty sure that DG never ported DG-UX to the Nova. There was
a native port to the Eclipse (32 bit).  There was also a Eunice-style
Unix environment that sat on top of their native OS, whatever it was
called.

When I was working there, DG gave the Georgia Tech School of Information
and Computer Science an Eclipse running their native OS in the early
mid-80s. I didn't do much with it, and I suspect that nobody else there
did either.

I'm bcc-ing Scott Lee, who was the admin for that machine at the time;
maybe he remembers more.

There was a guy who worked at DG and contributed a lot of the Motorola
88000 code to GCC whose name I don't remember, although I met him
at a USENIX.  If someone else remembers who this is, maybe he can
be tracked down for more info.

DG-UX was a pretty generic SVR3 (and later SVR4) system, IIRC.

In any case, DG-UX on the Eclipse preceded it on the 88000.

I hope this helps,

Arnold

P.S. For the youngsters here who've never heard of it, I highly
recommend Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about the
development of the Eclipse. (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+soul+of+a+new+machine+by+tracy+kidder&qid=1668271720&sprefix=the+soul+of+a+new%2Caps%2C233&sr=8-1).

It was originally written in 1982 - 40 years ago!

Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> This recent activity on the simh mailing list WRT to DG Nova and
> Ecpilse got me wondering.  At Locus in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of
> work with DG and DG-UX with their later MP-based ports using commercially
> available microprocessors (which I have reported was a very nicely done
> system, easy to work on, the locks tended to scale well, e*tc*.).
>
> But I am trying to remember if C or UNIX was on a Nova or an Eclipse.  This
> could be my failed memory, given that so many people ported V7 in the late
> 1970s (the infamous 'NUIX' bug from the Series/1 port probably being my
> favorite tale).  So to the hive mind, did anyone (DG themselves or a
> University) ever build 16 or 32-bit tools for the DG architectures and do a
> UNIX port, and if so, does anyone know what became of those efforts?  Is
> this something that needs to be in the TUHS archives also?
>
> Clem
> ???

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 09:52:05AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> P.S. For the youngsters here who've never heard of it, I highly
> recommend Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about the
> development of the Eclipse. (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+soul+of+a+new+machine+by+tracy+kidder&qid=1668271720&sprefix=the+soul+of+a+new%2Caps%2C233&sr=8-1).
> 
> It was originally written in 1982 - 40 years ago!

That's a great read, +1.

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Miod Vallat]

> There was a guy who worked at DG and contributed a lot of the Motorola
> 88000 code to GCC whose name I don't remember, although I met him
> at a USENIX.  If someone else remembers who this is, maybe he can
> be tracked down for more info.

I suppose you're referring to Tom Wood here?

> P.S. For the youngsters here who've never heard of it, I highly
> recommend Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about the
> development of the Eclipse. (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+soul+of+a+new+machine+by+tracy+kidder&qid=1668271720&sprefix=the+soul+of+a+new%2Caps%2C233&sr=8-1).
> 
> It was originally written in 1982 - 40 years ago!

Seconded - definitely a must read; even if technology has evolved a lot
since then, management and human factors have not.

Miod

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:10 AM Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr> wrote:

> > There was a guy who worked at DG and contributed a lot of the Motorola
> > 88000 code to GCC whose name I don't remember, although I met him
> > at a USENIX.  If someone else remembers who this is, maybe he can
> > be tracked down for more info.
>
> I suppose you're referring to Tom Wood here?
>
> > P.S. For the youngsters here who've never heard of it, I highly
> > recommend Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about the
> > development of the Eclipse. (
> https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+soul+of+a+new+machine+by+tracy+kidder&qid=1668271720&sprefix=the+soul+of+a+new%2Caps%2C233&sr=8-1
> ).
> >
> > It was originally written in 1982 - 40 years ago!
>
> Seconded - definitely a must read; even if technology has evolved a lot
> since then, management and human factors have not.
>

Bring them in, burn them out, sweat every hour out of them... call it
excellence. Bah

Warner

>

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[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[David Barto]

I worked on the DG-UX software porting device drivers to it.

It wasn’t a Unix port, it was a complete re-write from the ground up.

The interfaces to the drivers was different and the internal locking mechanisms
were unique to the OS. I’d never seen anything like it before, or after.

	David

> On Nov 12, 2022, at 8:52 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> I'm pretty sure that DG never ported DG-UX to the Nova. There was
> a native port to the Eclipse (32 bit).  There was also a Eunice-style
> Unix environment that sat on top of their native OS, whatever it was
> called.
> 
> When I was working there, DG gave the Georgia Tech School of Information
> and Computer Science an Eclipse running their native OS in the early
> mid-80s. I didn't do much with it, and I suspect that nobody else there
> did either.
> 
> I'm bcc-ing Scott Lee, who was the admin for that machine at the time;
> maybe he remembers more.
> 
> There was a guy who worked at DG and contributed a lot of the Motorola
> 88000 code to GCC whose name I don't remember, although I met him
> at a USENIX.  If someone else remembers who this is, maybe he can
> be tracked down for more info.
> 
> DG-UX was a pretty generic SVR3 (and later SVR4) system, IIRC.
> 
> In any case, DG-UX on the Eclipse preceded it on the 88000.
> 
> I hope this helps,
> 
> Arnold
> 
> P.S. For the youngsters here who've never heard of it, I highly
> recommend Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about the
> development of the Eclipse. (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+soul+of+a+new+machine+by+tracy+kidder&qid=1668271720&sprefix=the+soul+of+a+new%2Caps%2C233&sr=8-1).
> 
> It was originally written in 1982 - 40 years ago!
> 
> Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
>> This recent activity on the simh mailing list WRT to DG Nova and
>> Ecpilse got me wondering.  At Locus in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of
>> work with DG and DG-UX with their later MP-based ports using commercially
>> available microprocessors (which I have reported was a very nicely done
>> system, easy to work on, the locks tended to scale well, e*tc*.).
>> 
>> But I am trying to remember if C or UNIX was on a Nova or an Eclipse.  This
>> could be my failed memory, given that so many people ported V7 in the late
>> 1970s (the infamous 'NUIX' bug from the Series/1 port probably being my
>> favorite tale).  So to the hive mind, did anyone (DG themselves or a
>> University) ever build 16 or 32-bit tools for the DG architectures and do a
>> UNIX port, and if so, does anyone know what became of those efforts?  Is
>> this something that needs to be in the TUHS archives also?
>> 
>> Clem
>> ???

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Brad Spencer]

arnold@skeeve.com writes:

> I'm pretty sure that DG never ported DG-UX to the Nova. There was
> a native port to the Eclipse (32 bit).  There was also a Eunice-style
> Unix environment that sat on top of their native OS, whatever it was
> called.

AOS and then AOS/VS for the Eclipse.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s
I messed a whole lot with AOS/VS at the university I was at.  It was
very much Not Unix.  Towards the end of my time there, a number of
programs that traditionally would be on a Unix system, things like
sendmail, ftpd, and etc.. were natively ported to AOS/VS.  The ports
were probably done as best as they could have been, but they lacked a
whole lot of ability if I remember things correctly.

After I left, the university acquired a DG of some sort that ran DG-UX
(or DGUX).

[snip]

>
> Arnold





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

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[arnold]

Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr> wrote:

> > There was a guy who worked at DG and contributed a lot of the Motorola
> > 88000 code to GCC whose name I don't remember, although I met him
> > at a USENIX.  If someone else remembers who this is, maybe he can
> > be tracked down for more info.
>
> I suppose you're referring to Tom Wood here?

That doesn't sound right... I wish I could remember. :-(

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Clem Cole]

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On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 11:52 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

>
>
> DG-UX was a pretty generic SVR3
>
User space was generic.   But the SVR3/88K kernel was a heavy rewrite.
 LCC did a lot of work with DG adding stuff too it -- it was very well done
by the DG team in NC.   The memory and FS was well integrated.  Of all the
UNIX kernels we did work, it was pretty much the easiest to learn and
modify.

ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 01:04:30PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 11:52 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> > DG-UX was a pretty generic SVR3
> >
> User space was generic.   But the SVR3/88K kernel was a heavy rewrite.
>  LCC did a lot of work with DG adding stuff too it -- it was very well done
> by the DG team in NC.   The memory and FS was well integrated.  

So read()/write()/mmap() all shared the same cache like SunOS?  In SunOS the
only things not in the page cache were directories and inodes.  All data
pages had one, and only one, place to be (ZFS broke this in Solaris,
which has always blown my mind).
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Sat, 12 Nov 2022, Clem Cole wrote:

[ ... ]

> (the infamous 'NUIX' bug from the Series/1 port probably being my 
> favorite tale).

That would be the "NUXI" bug (byte-swapped words).

> So to the hive mind, did anyone (DG themselves or a University) ever 
> build 16 or 32-bit tools for the DG architectures and do a UNIX port, 
> and if so, does anyone know what became of those efforts?  Is this 
> something that needs to be in the TUHS archives also?

I remember Tracey Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine"...  It ran some 
proprietary system, though.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Clem Cole]

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On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 2:16 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

>
>
> That would be the "NUXI" bug (byte-swapped words).
>
Yep -- the reversal in my email was typo and then dyslexia on my part. ;-)

FYI: I was there when the guy from Cleveland State gave the paper.  It was
a riot.
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Clem Cole]

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To be honest, I've forgotten many (most) of the details.  But that sounds
about right.  As I remember it, it was like SunOS.  The key point was that
the kernel only had one view of the memory system period, no FS
buffer cache etc...which was a departure from many of the traditional UNIX
implementations.    IIRC they did not support BSD's mmap -- but check the
SVR3 docs to be sure -- they had the SVR3 user interfaces but none of the
BSD ones.  They did support the System V shared memory, however.  I do seem
to remember there was something funny in the driver interfaces, it was just
like UNIX only different, and that causes some heartache - but it was
fairly straightforward to move a DMA driver like getting a VME Xylogics
tape controller to work, but it took a little tweaking.  I've forgotten
exactly why that was --  it's been a long time ago.

Clem
ᐧ

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 1:36 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 01:04:30PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 11:52 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> > > DG-UX was a pretty generic SVR3
> > >
> > User space was generic.   But the SVR3/88K kernel was a heavy rewrite.
> >  LCC did a lot of work with DG adding stuff too it -- it was very well
> done
> > by the DG team in NC.   The memory and FS was well integrated.
>
> So read()/write()/mmap() all shared the same cache like SunOS?  In SunOS
> the
> only things not in the page cache were directories and inodes.  All data
> pages had one, and only one, place to be (ZFS broke this in Solaris,
> which has always blown my mind).
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>

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[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 02:36:05PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> To be honest, I've forgotten many (most) of the details.  But that sounds
> about right.  As I remember it, it was like SunOS.  The key point was that
> the kernel only had one view of the memory system period, no FS
> buffer cache etc...which was a departure from many of the traditional UNIX
> implementations.    IIRC they did not support BSD's mmap -- but check the

It sounds like they could have supported mmap() easily.  I'd love to see
this kernel, it sounds to me like it was SunOS with nicely done SMP 
support.  The guy that said he'd never seen anything like it before or
since, just makes me want to see it more.

I know someone who was friends with one of the kernel guys, haven't talked
to her in years but I'll see if I can find anything.