[TUHS] BSD/OS

[TUHS] BSD/OS

[Kevin Bowling]

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I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.

Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD
variant.  But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain
of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD.  There seems to be scant information
about it online.  Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere?

Regards,
Kevin

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[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[Warner Losh]

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On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 5:40 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com>
wrote:

> I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.
>
> Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial
> FreeBSD variant.  But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct
> strain of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD.  There seems to be scant
> information about it online.  Does anyone know if its story is told
> somewhere?
>

Wasn't this from BSDi? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD/OS It wasn't a
commercial version of 386bsd, per se, but based on a porting to the PC work
Jolitz had done prior to 386BSD.  They shared a common (very recent)
ancestor. And there was much drama around it all.

Or is this something else?

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[Kevin Bowling]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 4:44 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 5:40 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.
>>
>> Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD variant.  But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD.  There seems to be scant information about it online.  Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere?
>
>
> Wasn't this from BSDi? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD/OS It wasn't a commercial version of 386bsd, per se, but based on a porting to the PC work Jolitz had done prior to 386BSD.  They shared a common (very recent) ancestor. And there was much drama around it all.

Yeah you got it, this is the BSDi product that was previously called
BSD/386 and eventually wound down at WindRiver.

What I've gleaned so far is like you said, some of the 386bsd patch
set and then maybe the 4.4-lite refresh along the way.  The final
version has FreeBSD's CAM.

https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to
suggest it originated off Net/2 directly.

Very hard to find a cohesive story for some reason.

> Or is this something else?
>
> Warner

[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[John Levine]

It appears that Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> said:
>Wasn't this from BSDi? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD/OS It wasn't a
>commercial version of 386bsd, per se, but based on a porting to the PC work
>Jolitz had done prior to 386BSD.  They shared a common (very recent)
>ancestor. And there was much drama around it all.

Yes, it was a commercial peer of the other BSD forks. I used it for
quite a while until the company was sold and refocused on embedded
applications. It wasn't hard to move to FreeBSD which is what I am
still using.

When I moved tp upstate NY in 1996, I wanted an Internet connection
for my work. So I called up the local independent telco who told me
they had just rolled out their new Internet service. Great, can I have
a T-1? Dunno, have to ask the boss.

They called back and said there was no techncial problem but nobody in
my small town had ever ordered a T-1 before so they had to get a T-1
rate added to the tariff they had on file with the state. That took
about a month, after which a guy in suspenders with a ladder showed
up, ran the two-pair wire, he and I looked at the manual for the
CSU/DSU I'd gotten, wired it up, and whaddaya know it worked. (It was
worth the wait, their price was half what Verizon would have charged
in Ithaca.)

Well, that part worked.  They hadn't anticipated leased line customers
who wanted a /24 (which they just let me use, this was 30 years ago)
so they added me to their internal OSPF network.  I was running BSDI
on a cheap 386 box, set everything up, and oh crud, the routing
daemon didn't work due to bugs.

I contacted BSDI and, in one of those things that would be too strange
to be fiction, we found that the guy at Cornell who'd written the open
source routing daemon now worked for BSDI and lived about 10 minutes
from me. I called him up, he sent me some patches, and everything
worked. I could not have asked for better software support.  

He and I are still the local nerds which you can tell because his
car's license plate says TCP-IP and mine says IPV4.

R's,
John

[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 05:44:20PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 5:40???PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.
> >
> > Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial
> > FreeBSD variant.  But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct
> > strain of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD.  There seems to be scant
> > information about it online.  Does anyone know if its story is told
> > somewhere?
> >
> 
> Wasn't this from BSDi? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD/OS It wasn't a
> commercial version of 386bsd, per se, but based on a porting to the PC work
> Jolitz had done prior to 386BSD.  They shared a common (very recent)
> ancestor. And there was much drama around it all.

Pretty sure this was BSDi and had a bunch of the CSRG people trying to
make money off of BSD.  There was much drama and it didn't go anywhere.
Sun was pretty much the only company to make money off of BSD and it
was because SunOS was famously known as "a bug fixed, and completed,
BSD".  wnj had the mmap docs somewhere, he had the idea, Sun actually
implemented it and realized that a page cache and a buffer cache are 
two caches of the same thing (read/write went through the buffer cache,
mmap went through the page cache) and unified them.  Killed the buffer
cache except for directories and maybe inodes.  Took the other Unix
implementations at least a decade to catch up.  Ask me about HP-UX.

BSDi never did anything like what Sun did but they wanted the money,
hence the drama.

[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

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On 8/30/24 10:10 PM, John Levine wrote:

> I contacted BSDI and, in one of those things that would be too strange
> to be fiction, we found that the guy at Cornell who'd written the open
> source routing daemon now worked for BSDI and lived about 10 minutes
> from me. I called him up, he sent me some patches, and everything
> worked. I could not have asked for better software support.

Wasn't that Jeff Honig and gated? IIRC, he did some of the work I
incorporated into the custom 4.3 BSD I ran on my IBM RT during the
mid-90s.

-- 
``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/

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[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[John R Levine]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2024, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> source routing daemon now worked for BSDI and lived about 10 minutes
>> from me. I called him up, he sent me some patches, and everything
>> worked. I could not have asked for better software support.
>
> Wasn't that Jeff Honig and gated? IIRC, he did some of the work I
> incorporated into the custom 4.3 BSD I ran on my IBM RT during the
> mid-90s.

Yup.  That's his TCP-IP license plate.

Small world department: I did a lot of the architecture and some of 
the programming AIX, the Unix you did not run your RT.

R's,
John

[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

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On 8/31/24 7:20 PM, John R Levine wrote:
> AIX, the Unix you did not run your RT.

Oh, we tried. BSD just worked better for us.

-- 
``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/

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