[TUHS] Another odd comment in V6

[downing.nick@gmail.com (Nick Downing)]

Yes, you are right, I had not paid attention to that pc=opc stuff, in
fact 2.9 has a comment saying it's backing the PC up but the other
BSDs do not, so I hadn't noticed that bit. :) I was probably thinking
of another unix that implements it in the C library not the kernel,
however it makes no difference conceptually. Interestingly, 2.11BSD
has ERESTART defined as an errno and does the pc=opc thing if ERESTART
was to have been returned as the errno. Whereas the other BSDs have
another variable eosys which has just a few possible values, where one
of those values (NORMALRETURN or some such) means that errno should be
checked as well. I like the 2.11BSD way. V7 does not have the pc=opc
thing and there is no mention of restarting, so I suppose EINTR just
aborts the interrupted system call.
cheers, Nick


On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 11:27 PM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> Many thanks for that background!
>
> I think the quote from the Gabriel paper indeed refers to software
> interrupts, i.e. signals -- it would not make sense otherwise. The
> ITS system that the MIT guy referred to is 'large', it ran on PDP10
> mainframes.
>
> I understand how executing a signal handler is piggy-backed on the
> return from kernel mode. However, when the signal handler is
> finished it could either continue with the next instruction or
> re-excute the system call trap instruction. See
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/src/sys/sys/trap.c
> (towards end) for details how this is actually done in 2.9BSD.
> I think you referred to that mechanism as well.
>
> However, my question remains: why is that mysterious comment there,
> above ttread() in V6, and is there a link with the Gabriel story?
>
> Paul
>
> On 14 Feb 2017, at 12:27 , Nick Downing wrote:
>
>> Well I don't know about this actual conversation in history so I can't
>> help with that. But I can describe how interrupted system calls work.
>> [..more..]
>