The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [TUHS] MASSCOMP MC-500 Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver
@ 2019-04-29 14:38 Norman Wilson
  2019-04-29 14:53 ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2019-04-29 14:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Dennis's `The UNIX I/O System' paper in Volume 2 of the 7/e
manual is basically about how drivers work.  Is that near
enough, possibly as augmented by Ken's `UNIX Implementation'
paper in the same book?

Those were my own starting point, long ago, for understanding
how to write device drivers.  Along with existing source code
as examples, of course, but (unlikely many who hack on device
drivers, I'm afraid) I have always preferred to have a proper
statement of rules, conventions, and interfaces rather than
just reading code and guessing.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] MASSCOMP MC-500 Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver
@ 2019-04-29 13:49 Warner Losh
  2019-04-29 14:45 ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2019-04-29 13:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1393 bytes --]

Greetings,

I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J.
Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says:

"This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device
Driver.  The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the
documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared
for MASSCOMP  by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D."

I checked bit keepers and found nothing.

I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy,
etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all
kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well),
but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems
that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then
updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of
unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating
marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality).

As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I
wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today
(like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left
behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS
or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK).

Warner

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3139 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-04-29 14:55 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-04-29 14:38 [TUHS] MASSCOMP MC-500 Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver Norman Wilson
2019-04-29 14:53 ` Warner Losh
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-04-29 13:49 Warner Losh
2019-04-29 14:45 ` Clem Cole
2019-04-29 14:53   ` Larry McVoy

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).