[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Seth Morabito]

After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

-Seth
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[William Cheswick]

I never saw it. I believe the answer is no. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 24, 2018, at 11:13 AM, Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:
> 
> After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
> 
> -Seth
> -- 
>  Seth Morabito
>  Poulsbo, WA
>  web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> ...
> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of
> Bell Labs.
>
I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced you to
buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had bought the one we
had a Stellar otherwise).
The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the behavior
of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...

The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came out
around the same time, so it was just not interesting - *i.e.* 'JAWS' - Just
another work station' and it did not have a display.  IIRC, it was a server
and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
kicked butt
and were cheaper
.   The MIPS chip would emerge
with lots of designs,
and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
, too.

I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the
previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other
issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them
special - compared to everyone else.

The only 'successful' product
that I
can
remember that used the WE32100
was the
second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
was 68000 IIRC).  Does anyone know of another product?  I think I was told
the 5ESS
changed
 the SLICs
design
from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.

Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example of
AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, but it
was not clear it was worth it.   BTW: around the same time both AT&T and HP
were making their own DRAM too.  It was common thinking in management at
tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 'vertically
integrated.'  But in the case of both HP and AT&T there internally produced
DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market cost; so besides the
investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a pretty expensive insurance
policy.

That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second
source.'   Chip manufacturers would be required to license their designs to
some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's second source).   I
think HP was using a second source license for their memory, but IIRC AT&T
had developed its own because they had higher reliability standards.

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 12:06:22PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> IIRC, it was a server
> and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
> Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
> kicked butt and were cheaper

I dunno that they kicked butt, my memory is we were all playing leapfrog.
People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking 
about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the 
CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home 
about.  SPARC was sort of like that too, it was better but it was 
really really rare to have a chip that was 2x faster than its peers,
if that happened it was usually the introduction of one CPU generation
compared to the tail of another CPUs generation.

> The only 'successful' product that I can remember that used the WE32100
> was the second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
> was 68000 IIRC).  

Ah, the BLIT.  Pretty sure Wisconsin's CS department had the first generation
(aren't those the ones that caught on fire?).  I *loved* those terminals,
so much nicer than a single screen.

BTW, I had Greg Chesson here for a pig roast once, and he brought Bart.
I've got pics somewhere if anyone cares.

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Jon Forrest]

On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
> about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the
> CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
> about.  

When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.

(You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)

Jon

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 10:54:41AM -0700, Jon Forrest wrote:
> On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
> >about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the
> >CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
> >about.
> 
> When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
> followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.

2106A 275Mhz

> (You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
> at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
> one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)

I don't remember a lot of stuff, I'm old.  Old enough to get the joke that
when you are 25 and you open the fridge and ask "what am I doing here?"
it is existential question.  When you are my age and you open the fridge
and ask the same question it's because you forgot what you wanted.

That said, I do have some memory of going somewhere, but UCB?  I thought
Carl was at HP Labs?  But I do remember going somewhere.

And all these years later Carl and I are still close friends.  It is
a small world.  

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Mary Ann Horton]

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Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to 
use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the 
externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 
1980s.  We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told 
"eat your own dog food." The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had 
potential.  Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide 
turned in favor of Suns.


On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com 
> <mailto:web@loomcom.com>> wrote:
>
>     ...
>     I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
>     inside of Bell Labs.
>
> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced 
> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had 
> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).
> The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the 
> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS /etc/...
>
> The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came 
> out around the same time, so it was just not interesting - /i.e./ 
> 'JAWS' - Just another work station' and it did not have a display.  
> IIRC, it was a server and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for 
> that use.
> Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed 
> out, kicked butt
> and were cheaper
> .   The MIPS chip would emerge
> with lots of designs,
> and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
> , too.
>
> I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the 
> previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other 
> issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them 
> special - compared to everyone else.
>
> The only 'successful' product
> that I
> can
> rememberthat used the WE32100
> was the
> second version (/a.k.a./product version) of the Blit (Bart's first 
> version was 68000 IIRC).  Does anyone know of another product?  I 
> think I was told the 5ESS
> changed
>  the SLICs
> design
> from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
> longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.
>
> Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example 
> of AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, 
> but it was not clear it was worth it.   BTW: around the same time both 
> AT&T and HP were making their own DRAM too.  It was common thinking in 
> management at tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 
> 'vertically integrated.'  But in the case of both HP and AT&T there 
> internally produced DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market 
> cost; so besides the investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a 
> pretty expensive insurance policy.
>
> That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second 
> source.'   Chip manufacturers would be required to license their 
> designs to some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's 
> second source).   I think HP was using a second source license for 
> their memory, but IIRC AT&T had developed its own because they had 
> higher reliability standards.


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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Seth Morabito]

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On Mon, Aug 27, 2018, at 8:54 AM, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to
> use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the
> externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-
> late 1980s.  We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were
> told "eat your own dog food."  The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the
> 3B2 had potential.  Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs
> the tide turned in favor of Suns.> 
> On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito
>> <web@loomcom.com> wrote:>>> 
>>> ...
>>> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside
>>> of Bell Labs.>> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced
>> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had
>> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).>> The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the
>> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...[...]

Thank you all for your many replies!

I have a soft spot for the 3B2 because I've put so much work into
reverse engineering it and understanding it, but I can absolutely
understand why everyone wanted Suns. The 3B2 was a funny architecture,
and unless it had been a breakout hit right from the start, I can't
imagine a path that would have led to 3B2s taking over the world.
-Seth
--
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com




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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use
> AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
> developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s.  We
> all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
> food."
>
That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and Kolstad
made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody (ber
probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
amsussed.

The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
>
It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that they were nothing special -
too little too late.   The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk.   As I said, fighting the last
war.

The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
compete with the builtin graphics.   For the former, did the 3B2 only run
SRV3 and SRV4?   The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD.  By
SVR3 the OS finally got better.    BILT had some great stuff, but I think
the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.



> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in favor
> of Suns
>
Although by the time of its release, the default system for

SRV4 was Wintel.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[John P. Linderman]

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We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
worth.

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> below...
>
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:
>
>> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use
>> AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
>> developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s.  We
>> all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
>> food."
>>
> That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and
> Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody
> (ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
> amsussed.
>
> The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
>>
> It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that they were nothing special -
> too little too late.   The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
> starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
> room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
> Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk.   As I said, fighting the last
> war.
>
> The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
> behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
> compete with the builtin graphics.   For the former, did the 3B2 only run
> SRV3 and SRV4?   The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD.  By
> SVR3 the OS finally got better.    BILT had some great stuff, but I think
> the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
> on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.
>
>
>
>> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in
>> favor of Suns
>>
> Although by the time of its release, the default system for
>
> SRV4 was Wintel.
>
> Clem
>

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Brad Spencer]

"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> writes:

> We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
> series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
> for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
> it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
> prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
> worth.

[snip]


I was at 6200 Broad Street in Reynoldsburg in the late 1990s to early
2000s and while the group I was a part of was not forced to use the 3B
series for our product, we did get forced into using GIS [a.k.a. NCR]
systems after NCR was purchased.  The OS running on it was some sort of
SVR4, pretty vanilla, if I recall correctly.  I just remember it being
buggy.  That version of the product was sold to a single domestic US
customer.  All of the rest of the domestic customers waited for the
HP-UX port which happened after it was obvious no one wanted the NCR
product.  The product that I was a part of was old even at the time,
having been ported to the VAX [SVR3], test ported to SunOS 4.x, Tandem
and the AT&T rebranded variation [SVR3, and SVR4], GIS [SVR4] and HP
[HP-UX, lots of versions].  I have heard since that the product is still
around and runs on Linux at this point.




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

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Mon, 27 Aug 2018, Clem Cole wrote:

> That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and 
> Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody 
> (ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were 
> not amsussed.

I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a 
PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my 
SparcStation.

Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile 
and pretending that I liked it...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile and
> pretending that I liked it...

I don't think anyone really liked it.  Maybe Roger Faulkner.  And there
are the Joyent crew.  Even they, when I told them I had tried it and
wasn't impressed, asked if I had /opt/GNU/bin in my path first?  Huh?
Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning to the
compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?  SunOS was the system that everyone
used because they wanted to, Solaris was what people used because they
had to.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning [sic] to the
> compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?

As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.

> SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
> was what people used because they had to.

Nicely put!

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[George Michaelson]

we pretty much bounced a UNISYS library information system on using
',' (comma) as the separator on IPv4 dotted-quads. If there isn't a
dot, how can it be one?

I think the OS I used with a cd command which could walk down, but
walking "up" was a cd to root and a walk down -1 also fell out of
favour.

The only thing I remember doing on the apollo domain workstations was
tuning their sendmail config. nobody ran commands on it, nobody could
reliably compile.

HP and its HP compatibility library. and the really badly written BSD
compatibility layer.

oddly, OSF/1 and RS/6000 AIX both survived. maybe you can have enough
lipstick on a pig. reboot to re-apply bindings. well i *guess* that
works, but gee, was it really so hard to move shared library through
some staging process? and having to boot into a mini OS to do
filesystem repairs. please.

none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 4:02 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning [sic] to the
> > compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?
>
> As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
> of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.
>
> > SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
> > was what people used because they had to.
>
> Nicely put!
>
> Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:

> none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.

This goes back to Clem's argument about economics. The increasing power
and declining cost of Intel HW combined with the _almost_ neglible cost
of Linux combined to kill off almost all the legacy Unixes.

That Linux modelled many things after SunOS also helped.

But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 8/28/2018 2:42 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

If you haven't tried Solaris 11, at least 11.2 or later, check it out. A 
lot of GNU stuff is available, and you can "pkg install" apache, tomcat, 
PHP, MYSQL, and a slew of other things that are actually being kept up 
to date. The recent PHP 7.1.17 exploit fix was put out in the regular 
Solaris 11 SRU a few weeks after it was publicly released. And that was 
supposedly after the "mass layoff" of Solaris engineers. I've also 
noticed quite a few bug fixes for Solaris internals and device drivers 
since then so Oracle is still maintaining Solaris. I think their most 
recent support time line puts Solaris support out to 2030 or so.

I've installed and maintain a few Solaris 11.1 (since upgraded to 11.3) 
clusters for Oracle databases on Intel (Dell) blades with fiber channel, 
and with ZFS they've been rock-solid.

Side note, and I probably already said this a long time ago here, but 
back in the early days of Linux kernel 2.6, I complained on one of the 
mailing lists about the removal of a way to control the size of the disk 
cache, along with the tendency for the kernel to page out applications 
in favor of more disk cache. The snobby answer I got back from a 
developer was that (paraphrased) "We know better than you about memory 
allocation" or some such garbage. I've always turned my nose up at Linux 
since then. I figure if that level of arrogance had infested it to that 
degree, and an open-source project at that, I wanted no part of it. 
Since then, of course, they have made some changes that make it less 
likely to do that, but I have a recent Oracle Linux (Redhat) system here 
running Oracle eBusiness that is currently 2GB into swap, and has 10G of 
disk cache. Swappiness is set to 0, and other tunables were altered that 
should have stopped that. That's just plain dumb.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and 
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting 
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever 
tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and 
> > Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting 
> > big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
>
> Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever 
> tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).
>
> -- Dave

That's exactly what happened to me, at the same age.  Fortunately the
market where I live (Israel) is super hot for C++ / Linux developers,
and I landed a job at what so far is a reasonable start-up company.
("Praise the Lord", as they say.)

I hope you've found something.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

[...]

>> SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris 
>> was what people used because they had to.
>
> Nicely put!

Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
penguins have broken this time).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Harald Arnesen]

Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:

> Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> penguins have broken this time).

So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?
-- 
Hilsen Harald

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 02:36:47AM +0200, Harald Arnesen wrote:
> Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:
> 
> > Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> > sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> > at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> > BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> > penguins have broken this time).
> 
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

MacOS is based on Mach and Mach was a big steaming mess of promises that
were not so much.  Easy for me to say, I haven't written a VM system from
scratch and they did, so credit them for that.  But I've been in a VM
system that was oh so much easier to read and understand, the SunOS 4.x
VM system done by Joe Moran (mojo@sun.com).  That guy had crazy skills,
well beyond mine or anyone else I can think of.  When he quit the story
is that Bill Joy stopped him in the parking lot and offered him crazy
amounts of money to stay.

So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.

The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.

[TUHS] SunOS code?

[arnold]

Changed the subject line.

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
>
> The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.

So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.

Just a thought,

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

Sun never open sourced it.

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Changed the subject line.
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> >
> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> 
> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> 
> Just a thought,
> 
> Arnold

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Dan Cross]

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I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Sun never open sourced it.
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
> wasn't
> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > >
> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> >
> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> >
> > Just a thought,
> >
> > Arnold
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[William Pechter]

Didn't they un-open Solaris 11?

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:42
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Sun never open sourced it.
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
> wasn't
> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > >
> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> >
> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> >
> > Just a thought,
> >
> > Arnold
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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They didn't release the sources to Solaris 11. Anything released prior,
though, remains free.

Warner

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:44 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com> wrote:

> Didn't they un-open Solaris 11?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
> To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
> Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
> Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:42
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?
>
> I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
> code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
> for historical examination.
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > Sun never open sourced it.
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > Changed the subject line.
> > >
> > > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not
> impressed.
> > > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
> > wasn't
> > > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > > >
> > > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> > >
> > > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> > >
> > > Just a thought,
> > >
> > > Arnold
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> > http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
> >
>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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The problem is finding some at Oracle that would care and finding a proper
distribution tape to officially release.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:42 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
> code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
> for historical examination.
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> Sun never open sourced it.
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > Changed the subject line.
>> >
>> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
>> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not
>> impressed.
>> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it
>> wasn't
>> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
>> > >
>> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
>> >
>> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
>> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
>> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
>> >
>> > Just a thought,
>> >
>> > Arnold
>>
>> --
>> ---
>> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
>> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>>
>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Changed the subject line.
>
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> >
> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
>
> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
>

The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.

SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.

There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
it would be far from a drop-in.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:43 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>> Changed the subject line.
>>
>> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
>> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
>> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
>> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
>> >
>> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
>>
>> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
>> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
>> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
>>
>
> The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
>
> SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
> The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
> incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
>
> There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
> benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
> better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
> the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
> it would be far from a drop-in.
>

Also, a huge difference is that there's *NO* MP support for SunOS.
Solbourne produced OS/MP which was SunOS with fine-grained locking added (I
forget the degree to which it was, but IIRC, there were 'funnels' that used
locks around the different subsystems (so not one big giant lock), not
fine-grained in the sense we use it today. *THAT* source is harder to find
online...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 08:43:09AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> 
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> > >
> > > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> >
> > So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> > on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> > possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> >
> 
> The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
> 
> SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
> The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
> incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
> 
> There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
> benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
> better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
> the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
> it would be far from a drop-in.

The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.  
Everything else seems like a mess to me.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Steve Mynott]

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On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>

That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.

I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.

I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
or so.

I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.

S

-- 
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Andy Kosela]

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On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
>> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
>> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
>> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
>> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>>
>
> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>
> I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
> which did have problems at first.
>
> I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
> or so.
>
> I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
> has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
>
>

Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.

Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All three
had exceptional coding skills.

--Andy

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
>>> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
>>> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
>>> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
>>> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>>>
>>
>> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
>> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>>
>> I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
>> which did have problems at first.
>>
>
Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.


> I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
>> or so.
>>
>
It used to be downright aweful.


> I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
>> has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
>>
>
OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.


> Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
> the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
>
> Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All three
> had exceptional coding skills.
>

With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
has done well with DragonFly, however.

In the last 10 years or so there's been a number of people that have
stepped up and replaced them, most notably Allan Cox and Mark Johnston who
have mad coding skills and can play well with others. Though I'm sure I'm
slighting several people by not mentioning them.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Andy Kosela]

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On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
>>>> would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
>>>> rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
>>>> focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
>>>> Everything else seems like a mess to me.
>>>>
>>>
>>> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
>>> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>>>
>>> I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
>>> which did have problems at first.
>>>
>>
> Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
> awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
> BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
> involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
> quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.
>
>
>> I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
>>> or so.
>>>
>>
> It used to be downright aweful.
>
>
>> I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
>>> has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
>>>
>>
> OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.
>
>
>> Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
>> the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
>>
>> Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All
>> three had exceptional coding skills.
>>
>
> With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
> were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
> didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
> contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
> rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
> drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
> show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
> work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
> has done well with DragonFly, however.
>

Well, there are certainly as many sides to this story as there are people
involved.  Same with NetBSD/OpenBSD split.  Let's leave it as that as I
don't believe we have mentioned people on this list so they can't defend
themselves.

--Andy

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
> > would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
> > rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> > focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> > Everything else seems like a mess to me.
> >
> 
> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.

I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently.  Perhaps I'm just old and
tired but it looked pretty messy to me.  Still Mach based and the
Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
VM system, doesn't remotely compare.  Sun had some exceptional
talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 9:01 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
> > > would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
> > > rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> > > focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> > > Everything else seems like a mess to me.
> > >
> >
> > That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> > thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
>
> I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently.  Perhaps I'm just old and
> tired but it looked pretty messy to me.  Still Mach based and the
> Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
> VM system, doesn't remotely compare.  Sun had some exceptional
> talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
> group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.
>

It is still technically mach based, but it's fixed most of the scalability
issues Mach had (and that MacOS still has).

There's much clutter in the VM, and there's areas that could stand to be
rewritten, or to get at least a good cleaning.

The SunOS vm was far superior in its day, and likely is still cleaner than
what's in FreeBSD. But it can't scale like FreeBSD's vm (or NetBSD's or
even MacOS's) because it hasn't had the same care and feeding for the last
25 years. It's still single threaded and hasn't had the care and feeding to
make it perform well in MP situations. Solbourne spent years hacking it to
make it scale better, but even with 16 processors that was the high end for
them, and they were barely 10x faster than a uniprocessor for many work
loads due, in part, to vm contention limiting scalability. We had 2 8 CPU
machines that could build our software ~20% faster (with netmake) than the
1 16 CPU machine the OS group had, for example... I recall many discussions
with Dave Barak who did the fine-grained work on the 4.0 SunOS kernel
complaining about how many of the clever tricks in different subsystems
that worked great on UP were terrible for MP...

I don't doubt we'd be in an even better place today if we'd started with
the SunOS vm system in 4.4BSD rather than mach. Don't get me wrong. And
I'll not be the first in line to defend its elegance or clarity of design
(in fact, it has many design issues that took a decade to recode to
properly scale, and we're still not done). And lord knows even though I'm
not close to the foremost expert in the vm, I could easily put together an
hour or two talk on how all the areas of the VM that are holding us back.
Yet even with all that, I think that the ugly, warty, co-evolved code we
have in FreeBSD performs better than the SunOS vm code on any objective
benchmark you could have.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Steve Mynott]

There is a paper on the SunOS 4 VM available at

<https://web.archive.org/web/20000817230720/http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps>

(for some reason I always forget the ghostview binary is actually called
gv the rare time I use it!)

Some basic grepping suggests at least some of the tags in the paper were
still in use in Open Solaris at:

<https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/uts/common/vm>

There is a paper on UVM as well.

<https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor/cranor.pdf>

This says the original 4.4BSD Mach VM suffered from "swap memory leak
deadlock" and claims of its sibling (at least in 1999) that although the
FreeBSD VM is improved that "it still suffers from the object chaining
model it inherited".

The FreeBSD VM was documented before 2013 in

<https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/article.html>

"Much of the apparent complexity of the FreeBSD design, especially in
the VM/Swap subsystem, is a direct result of having to solve serious
performance issues that occur under various conditions."

-- 
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

All of those papers are here:

http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/
	SunOS.nvram.pdf
	SunOS.shlib.pdf
	SunOS.smoosh.pdf
	SunOS.tfs.pdf
	SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
	SunOS.vfs_arch.pdf
	SunOS.vm_arch.pdf
	SunOS.vm_impl.pdf

If you have pointers to a paper that is Sun related that I don't have 
I'd like to see that.

> <https://web.archive.org/web/20000817230720/http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps>
> 
> There is a paper on UVM as well.
> 
> <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor/cranor.pdf>

That's interesting, reading.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[David Arnold]

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> On 30 Aug 2018, at 00:43, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com <mailto:arnold@skeeve.com>> wrote:
> Changed the subject line.
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
> 
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> > I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
> > multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
> >
> > The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
> 
> So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
> on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
> possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
> 
> The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.

I found both 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) and 4.1.3 (which still has the m68k, sun2, and sun3 bits in it).

It’d be quite fun to walk through Bill & Lynne Jolitz’ Dr Dobbs 386BSD articles but with one of these as the starting point.




d

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Harald Arnesen wrote:

>> Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a 
>> shit sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like 
>> systems at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least 
>> vaguely BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see 
>> what the penguins have broken this time).
>
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo 
serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy 
driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).

And vice-versa; I had to learn how to control DTR etc on a genuine
serial port on the FreeBSD box (I am writing a user-level driver for
a serial device).

As for Penguin/OS (and trying to figure out just which header file uses 
which flags, when I'm using low-level Perl I/O), then forget it.

What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on 
Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.

I had a look at how they (Linux) wrote stty.c, and nearly threw up.

So, yes, that's pretty much my answer...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> 
> What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
> Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.

I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly
late innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
user interface.

In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:

	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0

Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type?  :-)

					- Ted

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:23:10PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> 
> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
> type?  :-)

This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.

	Warren

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:

> This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
> "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.

Last week I typed "crontab -" (missed the "e" for -e)  and then without 
realizing what happened Ctrl-C didn't work, typed Ctrl-D.  Argh. Lost 
around 20 crontabs which were in a directory I didn't backup. Luckily I 
had a syslog file with my recent jobs to recreate it, but lost all my 
comments and commented-out entries (for over ten years).

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:

> This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping 
> "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.

Hands up all those who have *not* done that...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 08/29/2018 04:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...

My faux pas is usually meaning to type "telinit q" but reaching a bit 
too far and accidnetally typing "telinit 1".

*facepalm*

/me starts the (not so) slow walk of shame to the DC.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services and Oracle on AIX.

Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in the future.
I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't adjacent.

Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 18:09
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

On 08/29/2018 04:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...

My faux pas is usually meaning to type "telinit q" but reaching a bit 
too far and accidnetally typing "telinit 1".

*facepalm*

/me starts the (not so) slow walk of shame to the DC.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an 
> IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services 
> and Oracle on AIX.

@^*% happens.

Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.

> Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis 
> for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in 
> the future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't 
> adjacent.

I remember things like that.

I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that 
it fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me 
and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word, 
primarily because of that established trust.

> Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and 
> dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.

Nice.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 05:04:48PM -0600, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> >Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis for
> >the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in the
> >future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
> >adjacent.
> 
> I remember things like that.
> 
> I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that it
> fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me and
> told them that something was not me and they took me at my word, primarily
> because of that established trust.

Yep, I'm the same way and I think most good to stellar engineers are the
same way.  How can you fix your stuff if you are in denial about it being
broken.

And I agree with you Grant, on the trust building.  Customers love it 
when you are honest.

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

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The only time I hid something like that was back in my Field Service days.

I smoked a third party data comm board which cost $$$$ while trying to
replace it.
DEC had me do something for one of my customers on a third party hardware
install.   I had no docs, training or experience with the board.
Unfortunately, the vendor didn't key a power cable and I flipped the damned
two pin wire blowing the chip top right off the board.

Wasn't sure it was my fault.  I stayed with the call until they got another
board and they got the box up and running and I finally figured I was the
cause
of the issue.  Didn't volunteer the info since I wasn't sure.   Probably
should've taken the hit.  When I did the bad thing I took the hit.

One of these was shorting +15v (IIRC) to Init L on the Unibus on an
11/780.  Blew the bits off all the boards back to the Unibus termination on
the DW780
and out to the M9302 Unibus terminator.

Spent the next two days rebuilding the box.
I still had a great relationship with the customer for the next 4 years at
the site.

People understand mistakes and will forgive.  Lying to a customer to keep
up a corporate image will never be forgotten if you get caught.

I remember stealing HDA's off of brand new RA81's at DEC's Princeton HQ to
get them out to customer sites before failures in the field from the glue
liquification issue.
Customers will stand by a company that puts them first and delivers serious
effort.
Nowadays the outsourced techs are pretty much parts carriers and swappers
with no ability to push company deliveries up and often they act as a
delaying action until the
company can deliver the correct services.

Bill


--
  d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
 pechter-at-gmail.com


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:05 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> > Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an
> > IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services
> > and Oracle on AIX.
>
> @^*% happens.
>
> Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.
>
> > Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis
> > for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in
> > the future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
> > adjacent.
>
> I remember things like that.
>
> I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that
> it fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me
> and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word,
> primarily because of that established trust.
>
> > Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and
> > dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.
>
> Nice.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Dan Mick]

On 08/29/2018 03:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
> 
>> This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
>> "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
> 
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
> 
> -- Dave

<raises hand>

I always type signal names.  Life's too short to worry about saving
three characters.

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

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On 08/29/2018 04:31 PM, Dan Mick wrote:
> I always type signal names.  Life's too short to worry about saving 
> three characters.

Signal names?  I've always used numbers / quit.  I don't think I've ever 
seen anybody do otherwise.

/me goes to read the man page.

Thank you for the pro tip Dan.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:

> Signal names?  I've always used numbers / quit.  I don't think I've ever 
> seen anybody do otherwise.

I've never used signal names (other than SIGTERM, when it got changed from 
14 to 15 for no good reason that I could see; at least it's now the 
default signal).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[ron]

I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember what
the mnemonics are.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:04 PM
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
> 
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
> 
> > This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
> > "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
> 
> Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
> 
> -- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[John P. Linderman]

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I remember doing a fresh install of unix on a VAX with another sysadmin. We
had spent a couple hours getting everything ready to go, and he had created
a bunch of temporary directories under /tmp to hold intermediate work. All
started with ".", so, in /tmp, he entered "rm -r .*". Unfortunately, that
matched .. as well. We knew something had gone very wrong when we got a
"/bin/rm: text busy" message as rm tried to remove itself.

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:06 AM, <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
> the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember
> what
> the mnemonics are.
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:04 PM
> > To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
> >
> > On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
> >
> > > This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
> > > "kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
> >
> > Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
> >
> > -- Dave
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:07 AM <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
> the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember
> what
> the mnemonics are.
>
Same here - there first time I saw the mnemonics were in the built-in kill
command in csh.    Which was usefule for "kill -cont"

but to this day, since like Ron I grew on fifth/sixth/seventh edition which
used numbers, the ones that I remember and care about are screwed into my
fingers.

I never have an issue with -1 vs -9 with kill, but I do not have great
story about how as a young engineer I wiped out the life's work of visiting
professor because Tektronix had the 0 and 1 keys next to each other on one
of the terminals they made.  It was the console of our 11/60 and we had two
RK05's and I fat fingured /dev/r...0 instead of 1.  Bad stuff.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

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At least in the old days drives had Write Protect switches.
Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette and leaving off Write Protect on hard disks.  Some disks had write protect jumpers on the boards... They should have been The STANDARD.

Bill

⁣Sent from BlueMail ​

On Aug 30, 2018, 09:25, at 09:25, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:07 AM <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
>> I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't
>take
>> the names.    It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to
>remember
>> what
>> the mnemonics are.
>>
>Same here - there first time I saw the mnemonics were in the built-in
>kill
>command in csh.    Which was usefule for "kill -cont"
>
>but to this day, since like Ron I grew on fifth/sixth/seventh edition
>which
>used numbers, the ones that I remember and care about are screwed into
>my
>fingers.
>
>I never have an issue with -1 vs -9 with kill, but I do not have great
>story about how as a young engineer I wiped out the life's work of
>visiting
>professor because Tektronix had the 0 and 1 keys next to each other on
>one
>of the terminals they made.  It was the console of our 11/60 and we had
>two
>RK05's and I fat fingured /dev/r...0 instead of 1.  Bad stuff.
>
>Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com> wrote:

> At least in the old days drives had Write Protect switches.
>
Not the issue - both disks were RW.  I was running as root and ran a
program that lacked a check it shoud have had it (because I was lazy and
never put it in there).



> Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette
>
You of course realized that was because of field service issues of course.
 Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using a twist
in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the jumpers
properly.




> and leaving off Write Protect on hard disks.  Some disks had write protect
> jumpers on the boards...
>
Hmmm.. I thought all disks at least had a strap.   WD, CDC, Seagate,
Shuggart, Toshiba all supported the strap.  The IBM disks I remember did
not also, but I'll take your word for it, it would have been like them to
have removed it to save the connector cost.




> They should have been The STANDARD.
>
Hmmm.. I'm not at home, but I think I have both the ST-412/506 and ESDI
specs in a filing cab somewhere.  I thought the standard did defined it.
(Intel blocks 'bitsavers.org' for some reason so I can not look online but
I think  http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/seagate/ST412_OEMmanual_Apr82.pdf is
likely to have it in there).

Clem

>

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette
>>
> You of course realized that was because of field service issues of
> course.   Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using
> a twist in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the
> jumpers properly.
>

 Ah yes, the original zeroconfig :)

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

Early plug and play.

Would have worked better if they trained the PC techs in how the stuff worked.

Bill
Old ex-tech turned sysadmin


-----Original Message-----
From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc: William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Sent: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 11:22
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette
>>
> You of course realized that was because of field service issues of
> course.   Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using
> a twist in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the
> jumpers properly.
>

 Ah yes, the original zeroconfig :)

Warner

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>
>> What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
>> Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.
>
> I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly
> late innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
> user interface.
>
> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0

Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
(along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

But options are an issue, notably with GNU software, which has a
completely different lineage.  Just look at FreeBSD ls(1) and GNU
ls(1).

> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
> type?  :-)

Creeping featurism!

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> >
> > 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> 
> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
> sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)

Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
1992 at the latest.

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.

    	      	      	       	     	- Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dan Cross]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1439 bytes --]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> > >
> > >     stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> >
> > Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> > (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
> > sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> > I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>
> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>
> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
> 1992 at the latest.
>

I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented in Net/2
(1991, though of course the entanglements there have been discussed), but
the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to be absent from the man
page).

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
> teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
> from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
> 4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.
>

I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
"Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
Solaris.

        - Dan C.

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.

I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.

-- 
``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/

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
> 
> I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
> on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
> AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
> macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.

I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
running AOS.  Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
few years ahead of me.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/29/18 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>
>>> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>>
>> I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
>> on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
>> AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
>> macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.
> 
> I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
> to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
> running AOS.  Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
> from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
> few years ahead of me.

Yep, they did. I maintained a custom kernel version for quite a long time,
but that computer is not one of the things that came along when we moved.

-- 
``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/

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arno Griffioen]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.

Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's. 

The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with 
using an assembler :)

Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!

							Bye, Arno.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Eric Wayte]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen@ieee.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>
> Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
>
> The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
> using an assembler :)
>
> Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
>
>                                                         Bye, Arno.
>

I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
RT back in the 80s.
-- 
Eric Wayte

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
I remember meeting the RT family of machines during the UNIXEXPO cycle
of events. Also what DEC was up to. It was both the IBM 6151 RT
machines and finally the odd looking design that they turned into. I
still have the mouse pad they gave me of a certain Viking working to
promote them.

I recall that the sales droid at the collection of RT machines was
rather vexed that I simply used the telnet command to walk my way
across the whole series.

I also recall that I was more impressed by the DEC crowd, and was
amused by the SUN efforts. You're right as usual Larry, they were
working too <DELETED> hard to promote themselves.

Kevin I've seen your site before, it is as informative as usual.

As for running AIX in a virtual machine, perhaps I will contact you
off list to discuss that idea, Kevin.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Eric Wayte <ewayte@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen@ieee.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
>> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>>
>> Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
>>
>> The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
>> using an assembler :)
>>
>> Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
>>
>>                                                         Bye, Arno.
>
>
> I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
> RT back in the 80s.
> --
> Eric Wayte

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
> "Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
> Solaris.

AOS was used by MIT's Project Athena.  DEC and IBM both contributed $5
million/year in staff or equipment, while MIT contributed $2
million/year.  So Athena was funded at $12 million for five years,
which was later extended by another 3 years.

Initially the DEC and IBM equipment was running on BSD 4.3/4.3 Tahoe.
DEC later moved us to Ultrix, and IBM to AIX (sigh).

Sun equipment was later added to the mix (purchased and funded by MIT).

   	       	       	     	       - Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Wednesday, 29 August 2018 at 10:41:02 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>>> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
>>>> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>>>>
>>>>     stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>>>
>>> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
>>> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
>>> sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
>>> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>>
>> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>>
>> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
>> 1992 at the latest.

Right, which is why I wrote

  I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

In case that wasn't clear, I meant a later date than 4.3BSD.

> I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> be absent from the man page).

No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:

  static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c	5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";

And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.

Greg
--
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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> > I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> > in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> > discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> > be absent from the man page).
>
> No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
> I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
> FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:
>
>   static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c    5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";
>
> And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
> of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
> from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.
>

Net/2 was the basis of 386BSD, which begat the patchkits, which begat
FreeBSD and NetBSD.

One of the problems with early Linux was that they were just a bunch of
guys (and sometimes gals) that had access to these cool unix systems. At
the time, there was quite the lag between release by research / university
and running in a commercial Unix. So in the early 1990s, there were  a
bunch of systems based on 4.2BSD, as well as many based on System V, which
lacked the -f flag. At the time, it was at the end of the isolated phase of
Unix, where people just made stuff up in relative isolation and when the
cross pollination effects of USENET and the first Unix converts having had
a decade or so under their belts. The Linux guys weren't old-time Bell Labs
guys that would know the differences in detail between the different
strains, especially the people that were writing one-off utilities, often
to an old, out of date man page, that Linux encouraged to contribute.
Nothing wrong with all that, it was a crazy time trying to recreate things
at a mile a minute. But some details were not faithfully emulated. It's not
surprising: there was always so much to do. So while it existed when they
started, it's unlikely the knowledge had diffused enough for them to know
about it when it came time to code...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly late 
> innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's user 
> interface.

Yeah, I suppose that's it, but in true GNU style they also have 
"--file=/dev/XXX", so why not "-f"?

> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining 
> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>
> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when 
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to 
> type?  :-)

Ah, but then the shell does the opening, which might not be the mode that 
you wanted; I was doing some funky I/O redirection at the time as well.

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 29 Aug 2018, at 03:06, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).

I’m glad I’m not the only one who has infinite problems with these dongles. I have a sacred old laptop running OpenBSD precisely to get serial consoles working as a) it has an RS-232 port and b) the drivers are sane. I have a USB-serial dongle which on Mac, once the driver is installed, creates a device called /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Serial-SiLo. Took me an eternity to figure out it was that because the docs had nothing about which device file it actually created and, well, considering it is a physical cable I had eliminated Bluetooth to begin with… I confess to looking at the creation date on the device file and then saying “naah, it cannot be… oh… it is…”

I do miss SunOS too - because of a single user with great powers we had to upgrade a SparcStation 10 to Solaris back in 1994 and the performance took an instant nosedive. Not to mention the hours spent getting tools to make it actually work (i.e. 99% of the GNU project).

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a
> PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
> SparcStation.

I made a "Satan Inside" PS file once, along with a "Downgrade to Solaris"
PS file. Must dig them out ....

Cheers, Warren

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Paul Winalski]

On 8/27/18, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a
> PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
> SparcStation.

We stuck an International House of Pancakes "Powered by Pancakes"
sticker on the power supply box of our IBM mainframe.

-Paul W.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

I am pretty sure that V8 was the first research system to run on
Vaxen, and I believe that Research used 750 and later 8550s for
their systems. Norman could probably give a defnitive answer.

V7 on the Interdata aside, Plan 9 is when you saw a big push to
a multiplatform system: MIPS, SPARC, 68040 and 386.

Arnold

Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and
> emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
> inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was
> ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that
> would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>
> -Seth
> -- 
>   Seth Morabito
>   Poulsbo, WA
>   web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > The problem is finding some at Oracle that would care

Well, I've got a nephew who's been at Oracle for like 20+ years; he can
probably point us at the right person.

    > and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.

Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS', and that
term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents (e.g. Sun
licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.

It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't need
Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?

	Noel

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 03:41:06PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't need
> Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?

I'd really like the SCCS history.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1617 bytes --]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 1:41 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.
>
> Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS', and
> that
> term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents (e.g.
> Sun
> licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.
>
> It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't need
> Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?
>

The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne, was
that SunOS wasn't just AT&T + BSD 4.2 +  4.3 + awesome hacking at SMI.
There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there that could not
be relicensed, even 28 years ago when things were fresh. Good luck getting
those third party permissions now... Sun's paid-up Unix license they did
for Solaris would cover any bits of AT&T code that was in there.

A quick grep of something that fell off an http server suggests that the
number of these is quite limited. However, the files they are on have no
other license, even though latter-day versions are available of hack, hunt,
indent and pax are available (though to be fair, the latter two do give
permission explicitly, and a good case can be made for hunt). I have no way
of knowing, however, if there are other IP issues, not limited to unmarked
sources, copyright notices that aren't 'well formed', code that's been
hacked by third parties under a contract granting them copyright ownership
and sun just a license, etc. It's that quagmire that efforts like this will
run up against.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 02:04:10PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 1:41 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> >     > and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.
> >
> > Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS', and
> > that
> > term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents (e.g.
> > Sun
> > licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.
> >
> > It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't need
> > Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?
> >
> 
> The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne, was
> that SunOS wasn't just AT&T + BSD 4.2 +  4.3 + awesome hacking at SMI.
> There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there that could not
> be relicensed, even 28 years ago when things were fresh. 

So I've been down this path, it was STREAMS and RFS, and maybe a couple
of drivers.  I pulled all that crud out, put back the BSD tty code,
and I had a SunOS we could have given away.  It was back when I was
writing this:

http://mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/freeos.pdf

and I needed to be able to show that what I was asking for was possible.

> A quick grep of something that fell off an http server suggests that the
> number of these is quite limited. However, the files they are on have no
> other license, even though latter-day versions are available of hack, hunt,
> indent and pax are available (though to be fair, the latter two do give
> permission explicitly, and a good case can be made for hunt). 

So you are including userland.  I'm not sure you need to.  Yeah, there was
some unicode work done there but quite frankly, I'd just have 

	/usr/gnu/bin
	/usr/bsd/bin
	/usr/sun/bin

and dump anything questionable in sun/bin.  It's the kernel that was the
most interesting, next would be the run time loader and shared libraries.
/usr/bin wasn't that exciting, the BSD purists might want that but I gotta
believe that BSD has caught up to Sun in 25 years (right???).

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 4:22 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
>
> So I've been down this path, it was STREAMS and RFS, and maybe a couple
> of drivers.  I pulled all that crud out, put back the BSD tty code,
> and I had a SunOS we could have given away.  It was back when I was
> writing this:
>
> http://mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/freeos.pdf
>
> and I needed to be able to show that what I was asking for was possible.
>

Good to know you think it was possible.   I know in the case of Ultrix and
HP-UX lots of external folks licenses small things like Mentat, MIPS etc.
 For instance, one of the Ultrix and Alpha bug-a-boos was the MIPS
compiler, which leaked into the IP stream along the way.    As far as I
remember from my Locus days when we had just about everybody's sources from
IBM to Sun, the problem was the license was not just the OEM and AT&T,
there was always the sub-licenses from some deal or another that the OEM
had cut at some point.

Clem
ᐧ

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 04:33:06PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 4:22 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > So I've been down this path, it was STREAMS and RFS, and maybe a couple
> > of drivers.  I pulled all that crud out, put back the BSD tty code,
> > and I had a SunOS we could have given away.  It was back when I was
> > writing this:
> >
> > http://mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/freeos.pdf
> >
> > and I needed to be able to show that what I was asking for was possible.
> 
> Good to know you think it was possible.   I know in the case of Ultrix and
> HP-UX lots of external folks licenses small things like Mentat, MIPS etc.

At this point, Linux has won, I don't think anyone would care if we got
the whole pile.

As Rob Gingell once said "Bits rot.  Unmaintained source quickly becomes
worthless".

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 4:36 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
> As Rob Gingell once said "Bits rot.  Unmaintained source quickly becomes
> worthless".
>
Yep.   So the question goes back to what is SunOS 4.x.y.  You seem to be
thinking in terms of looking at the kernel from those days (which is a fine
definition), but others said - hey I want to run this on my X or Y system.
 That's a different definition I think.
Clem

ᐧ

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 04:40:49PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 4:36 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > As Rob Gingell once said "Bits rot.  Unmaintained source quickly becomes
> > worthless".
> >
> Yep.   So the question goes back to what is SunOS 4.x.y.  You seem to be
> thinking in terms of looking at the kernel from those days (which is a fine
> definition), but others said - hey I want to run this on my X or Y system.
>  That's a different definition I think.

I suspect that if SunOS got any traction it would be the kernel plus
maybe their shared libs and the Linux user space.  And it would need to
be ported to x86_64.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 2:22 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 02:04:10PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 1:41 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >     > and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.
> > >
> > > Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS',
> and
> > > that
> > > term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents
> (e.g.
> > > Sun
> > > licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.
> > >
> > > It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't
> need
> > > Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?
> > >
> >
> > The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne, was
> > that SunOS wasn't just AT&T + BSD 4.2 +  4.3 + awesome hacking at SMI.
> > There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there that could
> not
> > be relicensed, even 28 years ago when things were fresh.
>
> So I've been down this path, it was STREAMS and RFS, and maybe a couple
> of drivers.  I pulled all that crud out, put back the BSD tty code,
> and I had a SunOS we could have given away.


Why would STREAMS and RFS be a problem post OpenSolaris?


> It was back when I was
> writing this:
>
> http://mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/freeos.pdf
>
> and I needed to be able to show that what I was asking for was possible.
>
> > A quick grep of something that fell off an http server suggests that the
> > number of these is quite limited. However, the files they are on have no
> > other license, even though latter-day versions are available of hack,
> hunt,
> > indent and pax are available (though to be fair, the latter two do give
> > permission explicitly, and a good case can be made for hunt).
>
> So you are including userland.  I'm not sure you need to.  Yeah, there was
> some unicode work done there but quite frankly, I'd just have
>
>         /usr/gnu/bin
>         /usr/bsd/bin
>         /usr/sun/bin
>
> and dump anything questionable in sun/bin.  It's the kernel that was the
> most interesting, next would be the run time loader and shared libraries.
> /usr/bin wasn't that exciting, the BSD purists might want that but I gotta
> believe that BSD has caught up to Sun in 25 years (right???).
>

grep -r was easy :).

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 02:38:39PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > I pulled all that crud out, put back the BSD tty code,
> > and I had a SunOS we could have given away.
> 
> Why would STREAMS and RFS be a problem post OpenSolaris?

That was then, this is now.  Back then they were definitely a problem.
I nuked all the AT&T Sys V stuff in the kernel because that had perceived
value to AT&T, they still thought Sys V was going to rule the world.
So I took us back to BSD + Sun's work.  Which was a more pleasant place
anyway IMO.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 4:42 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
> So I took us back to BSD + Sun's work.  Which was a more pleasant place
> anyway IMO.
>
Certainly easier to understand ;-)

ᐧ

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 3:41 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Clem Cole
>
>     > The problem is finding some at Oracle that would care
>
> Well, I've got a nephew who's been at Oracle for like 20+ years; he can
> probably point us at the right person.
>
>     > and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.
>
> Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS', and
> that
> term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents (e.g.
> Sun
> licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.
>
> Two issues:  1.) what consitutes release X or Y and 2) sublicenses.

For the former, Sun did have source distributions, typically for
Universities and certain OEMs.  Stellar had a 4.x license for the Sun3s but
I can not tell you which one (we used Sun3's as the porting base and wanted
the basic Sun3 support from SunOS to support it as we developed Stellix).
 For the later, we need to make sure you have the whole thing.   Most OEM's
had stuff from other firms, from compilers to whole subsystems.
ᐧ

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Lars Brinkhoff]

I have something called sunos-414-source.tar.gz.  It expands to a
solaris_112 directory.  There are sources for kernel, etc, bin ucb,
5bin, usr.bin...  Looks to be sun4 only, no 68k.  No version history.

Free to a good home.  (I sent a copy to Kossow years ago.)

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2018, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:

> I have something called sunos-414-source.tar.gz.  It expands to a 
> solaris_112 directory.  There are sources for kernel, etc, bin ucb, 
> 5bin, usr.bin...  Looks to be sun4 only, no 68k.  No version history.
>
> Free to a good home.  (I sent a copy to Kossow years ago.)

Umm, this message is a bit confusing...  Is it a single physical medium 
that you happened to have, or software that you are willing to distribute 
upon some sort of an agreement, or what?

At the very least, it ought to find its way into Warren's hands...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
Of course I am interested. I am as they say, always interested. But I
also agree with Dave there as well. A copy should be delivered to
Warren.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 5:50 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Aug 2018, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
>
>> I have something called sunos-414-source.tar.gz.  It expands to a
>> solaris_112 directory.  There are sources for kernel, etc, bin ucb, 5bin,
>> usr.bin...  Looks to be sun4 only, no 68k.  No version history.
>>
>> Free to a good home.  (I sent a copy to Kossow years ago.)
>
>
> Umm, this message is a bit confusing...  Is it a single physical medium that
> you happened to have, or software that you are willing to distribute upon
> some sort of an agreement, or what?
>
> At the very least, it ought to find its way into Warren's hands...
>
> -- Dave

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Lars Brinkhoff]

> Hello!
> Of course I am interested. I am as they say, always interested. But I
> also agree with Dave there as well. A copy should be delivered to
> Warren.

Ok, sounds great!

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Larry McVoy

    > I'd really like the SCCS history.

Any idea if that even still exists, or did it get shredded somewhere along the
way?

Anyway, should I spin up my nephew on trying to find the right person to put
out a historic, personal-use license?

	Noel

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Earl Baugh]

I’d be interested. Especially for my Sun 1/100

Earl. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 30, 2018, at 3:54 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>> From: Larry McVoy
> 
>> I'd really like the SCCS history.
> 
> Any idea if that even still exists, or did it get shredded somewhere along the
> way?
> 
> Anyway, should I spin up my nephew on trying to find the right person to put
> out a historic, personal-use license?
> 
>    Noel

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Warner Losh

    > The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne,
    > was that ... There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there
    > that could not be relicensed ... if there are other IP issues, not
    > limited ... It's that quagmire that efforts like this will run up
    > against.

Oh, we'll just ask Oracle for a license 'for all parts of SunOS for which they
have the ability to grant a licence'.

There's no way I'd want them to have to chase down all the corner cases,
that's just a way to guarantee it will never happen. I'd want to ask for the
bare minimum of time/effort on their part.

Anything above that, probably the SCCS stuff would be next on the priority
list, sounds like.

	Noel

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Kevin Bowling]

The effects of copyright on abandonware have been discussed pretty
widely in other communities.  The primary issue is the contracts and
right don't simply expire and it's rare for a company to completely
shutter (i.e. assets including these copyrights are acquired or given
to creditors).

Oracle would need to establish that they have providence over the
files and code, and that exceptions for Novel and other code were
covered by the OpenSolaris rights reviews.  I imagine it might cost
low hundreds of thousands of dollars to do lawyers being what they are
and commercial *nix being such a melting pot of sources.  Since there
is no conceivable revenue stream and Oracle isn't much for goodwill I
am highly skeptical.

Sun releasing OpenSolaris when they finally did and under the CDDL was
pretty tone deaf to what was going on in the market with Linux, but
you have to admire the amount of contract review and legal work that
must have taken.

Regards,
Kevin


On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 2:34 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>     > From: Warner Losh
>
>     > The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne,
>     > was that ... There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there
>     > that could not be relicensed ... if there are other IP issues, not
>     > limited ... It's that quagmire that efforts like this will run up
>     > against.
>
> Oh, we'll just ask Oracle for a license 'for all parts of SunOS for which they
> have the ability to grant a licence'.
>
> There's no way I'd want them to have to chase down all the corner cases,
> that's just a way to guarantee it will never happen. I'd want to ask for the
> bare minimum of time/effort on their part.
>
> Anything above that, probably the SCCS stuff would be next on the priority
> list, sounds like.
>
>         Noel

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Cág]

Kevin Bowling wrote:

> Sun releasing OpenSolaris when they finally did and under the CDDL was
> pretty tone deaf to what was going on in the market with Linux, but
> you have to admire the amount of contract review and legal work that
> must have taken.

How is OpenSolaris different from SunOS (Sun/Oracle Solaris) anyway?
Isn't the relationship kinda RHEL-CentOS'ish? I.e. one is community-
-supported, and another is commercially.

--
caóc

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 5:36 PM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:

> How is OpenSolaris different from SunOS (Sun/Oracle Solaris) anyway?
> Isn't the relationship kinda RHEL-CentOS'ish? I.e. one is
> community--supported, and another is commercially.
>
Yikes -- this is like Rolls Royce cutting a deal with GM and produce a new
car based on the Chevy Sububuran, painting it, adding a few details  and
calling it a Silver Ghost.


SunOS != is not Solaris

ᐧ

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Arthur Krewat]

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On 8/31/2018 5:39 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> SunOS != is not Solaris
>
> ᐧ

Confusion may arise because the last released SunOS 4.1.4 was called 
"Solaris 1.1.2".

Solaris nor SunOS were ever "community supported" although one could 
make the case that SunOS was more generally liked ;)





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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 3:36 PM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:

> Kevin Bowling wrote:
>
> > Sun releasing OpenSolaris when they finally did and under the CDDL was
> > pretty tone deaf to what was going on in the market with Linux, but
> > you have to admire the amount of contract review and legal work that
> > must have taken.
>
> How is OpenSolaris different from SunOS (Sun/Oracle Solaris) anyway?
> Isn't the relationship kinda RHEL-CentOS'ish? I.e. one is community-
> -supported, and another is commercially.
>

No. Not even close.

SunOS is BSD based (first 4.2 then 4.3 then with some small amount of
System V code) with a written from scratch vm.

Solaris is sun's do-over based on System V Release 4. It's great leap
backwards. It was a huge slap in the face of the old SunOS crew by inept
management. The final indignity was SunOS 4.1 being rebranded Solaris 1.0,
which was pure marketing...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 04:34:51PM -0500, C??g wrote:
> Kevin Bowling wrote:
> 
> > Sun releasing OpenSolaris when they finally did and under the CDDL was
> > pretty tone deaf to what was going on in the market with Linux, but
> > you have to admire the amount of contract review and legal work that
> > must have taken.
> 
> How is OpenSolaris different from SunOS (Sun/Oracle Solaris) anyway?
> Isn't the relationship kinda RHEL-CentOS'ish? I.e. one is community-
> -supported, and another is commercially.

SunOS was based on the BSD code, the entire system was frequently
described as "a bug fixed BSD".  It was, of course, a lot more than that,
Sun dis shared libs, a new (much, much better) VM system, invented the
vnode interface that virtualized file systems, BSD had none of that.

Lots of Usenix papers describing that work here:

SunOS felt very much like BSD, all the stuff you thought would work,
usually did, the user space was very BSD like.

http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/

Solaris was Sys Vr4 (which, if I recall correctly, differed from r3
largely due to some stuff being ported over from SunOS).  Both the kernel
and user space went to a Sys V compat system, it no longer felt anything
like BSD.

So why would Sun take something that everyone loved and replace it
with that steaming pile of Sys V garbage?  Only the top execs actually
knew the real reason, I'm 99% sure my boss, Ken Okin (VP of all server
hardware), did not know the real reason.  Which was, Sun was in some
financial trouble, I don't know the details, but AT&T bought $200M of
Sun stock at 35% over market to bail them out.  In return, Sun had to
drop SunOS and go with Sys V.  AT&T was betting that Sun would make Sys
V as popular as SunOS.

Didn't happen.  Not even close.  A lot of people just bailed, trying to
work with Sys V was miserable.  It put us backwards at least 10 years and
I'd argue more than that.  The engineers loved SunOS and tons of work
got done on the system that management never asked for, the engineers
really drove the agenda.  When all that work was yanked away, it took
the heart out of engineering.

A bunch of people stuck around and tried, they really did and I applaud
them for it but the damage was done.  I was gone by the time ZFS came out
so I have no idea how that passed through the formal vetting process that
Sun had in place.  When I was there, if I had proposed a file system that
wouldn't use the page cache, you'd have to copy from the buffer cache
into the page cache to get mmap to work, I would have been kicked out
of the room and probably kicked out of the kernel group.  We had spent
SO FRIGGING MUCH TIME getting rid of the buffer cache, precisely because
trying to maintain coherency between the page cache (mmap) and the buffer
cache (read/write), it was clear that you wanted a unified model.

Yet the wise heads in charge approved ZFS.  It boggles my mind.  Yeah,
I get it, it's got lots of nice features.  But at the expense of breaking
one of the cornerstones of the kernel design.

The only thing I can think of is that the people who could see the whole
kernel architecture had left, I can't imagine Kleiman, Gingell, Rosenthal,
Powell, any of the old school distinguished engineers, tolerating that
for 1 second.  So my guess is they were gone and nobody in the vetting
process saw the whole picture any more.

If anyone is lurking on the list and was there for the ZFS work, I'd
love to hear your take on it.  I'm speculating.  It just blows my mind
that something that was one of the main design points for the previous
10-15 years, was ignored.  We're not talking about some obscure device
driver, we're talking about mmap(), which was one of the reasons Sun ran
circles around the other guys, they all had crappy mmap() implementations
that copied.  ZFS went back to that.  Weird.

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 885 bytes --]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 3:59 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> A bunch of people stuck around and tried, they really did and I applaud
> them for it but the damage was done.  I was gone by the time ZFS came out
> so I have no idea how that passed through the formal vetting process that
> Sun had in place.  When I was there, if I had proposed a file system that
> wouldn't use the page cache, you'd have to copy from the buffer cache
> into the page cache to get mmap to work, I would have been kicked out
> of the room and probably kicked out of the kernel group.  We had spent
> SO FRIGGING MUCH TIME getting rid of the buffer cache, precisely because
> trying to maintain coherency between the page cache (mmap) and the buffer
> cache (read/write), it was clear that you wanted a unified model.
>

It's reason #1 why Netflix can't use ZFS: the double copy problem...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Cág]

Larry McVoy wrote:

> SunOS was based on the BSD code, the entire system was frequently
> described as "a bug fixed BSD".
> Solaris was Sys Vr4 [...].  Both the kernel and user space went to a
> Sys V compat system, it no longer felt anything like BSD.
 
I find it kinda weird, considering what Bill Joy did for BSD and,
obviously, for Sun. I wonder what he himself thinks about it. Shout out
to Bill if he reads the list.

Also, I'm using the original vi (ex-vi that is from Heirloom), not nvi,
as my development platform. Another weird thing: his original vi never
made it to any BSD distribution.

--
caóc

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Jon Forrest]

On 8/31/2018 3:19 PM, Cág wrote:

> Also, I'm using the original vi (ex-vi that is from Heirloom), not nvi,
> as my development platform. Another weird thing: his original vi never
> made it to any BSD distribution.

Are you quite sure? I remember using BSD on a VAX in about 1978
when vi just came out. I'm pretty sure Bill Joy wrote the man
page and other documentation.

Maybe it depends on what you mean by "his original vi".

Jon

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Cág]

Jon Forrest wrote:

> Are you quite sure? I remember using BSD on a VAX in about 1978
> when vi just came out. I'm pretty sure Bill Joy wrote the man
> page and other documentation.

*Open-source BSD distribution. I think it had some license restrictions
when the Jolitzes made the 386 port, so they had to put an alternative.
Then it was Elvis, nvi was written later on.

--
caóc

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Jon Forrest]

On 8/31/2018 3:30 PM, Cág wrote:
> Jon Forrest wrote:
> 
>> Are you quite sure? I remember using BSD on a VAX in about 1978
>> when vi just came out. I'm pretty sure Bill Joy wrote the man
>> page and other documentation.
> 
> *Open-source BSD distribution. I think it had some license restrictions
> when the Jolitzes made the 386 port, so they had to put an alternative.
> Then it was Elvis, nvi was written later on.

Those of us who used pre-open-source BSD probably have a different
recollection of what BSD was like than those who came later.

Jon

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Donald ODona]

At 31 Aug 2018 22:32:06 +0000 (+00:00) from "Cág" <ca6c@bitmessage.ch>:
> Then it was Elvis, nvi was written later on.

"It was originally derived from the first incarnation of elvis, written by Steve Kirkendall, as noted in the README file included in nvi's sources. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi#Credits_and_distribution

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Cág]

Forgot to add: thanks for the good read, Larry!

--
caóc

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 8/31/2018 5:58 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> Solaris was Sys Vr4 (which, if I recall correctly, differed from r3
> largely due to some stuff being ported over from SunOS).  Both the kernel
> and user space went to a Sys V compat system, it no longer felt anything
> like BSD.
>

I would be very interested in anyone's recollections of how Solaris 
eventually turned out performance-wise, say version 9+, compared to 
other operating systems. SunOS, Linux, AIX, etc.

I find it's about equal, and even exceeds Linux in terms of it's NUMA 
support and multi-processor support. I need to move some systems away 
from Solaris and off to Linux, and I find it's NUMA support lacking in 
certain ways.

ak

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 07:02:36PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> On 8/31/2018 5:58 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >
> >Solaris was Sys Vr4 (which, if I recall correctly, differed from r3
> >largely due to some stuff being ported over from SunOS).  Both the kernel
> >and user space went to a Sys V compat system, it no longer felt anything
> >like BSD.
> >
> 
> I would be very interested in anyone's recollections of how Solaris
> eventually turned out performance-wise, say version 9+, compared to other
> operating systems. SunOS, Linux, AIX, etc.

I did some updating of lmbench [*] when I was dancing with Netflix.  I
need to check that in and publish that because the bits have rotted
since 1995.  I have no idea if that will measure what you want, it's
a bunch of microbenchmarks that measure bandwidth and latency of 
everything I could think of: network, disks, file systems, caches,
memory, etc.  It's interesting but might not be so to you.

If you want to know if Solaris is at the same place as Linux, I can
pretty much promise it is not in the "getting out of the way of the
application".  Solaris was known as Slowaris for a reason.  Yeah, I
know it sucked harder in the beginning, but those were order of 
magnitude suckages.  Linus always cared about performance, he had
a big hand in lmbench, we both cared.

Linus was about performance like I am about code size.  I ran the
BitKeeper dev team for almost 20 years.  I loved a changeset that removed
more lines than it added.  We got up to about 120K lines of code in the
core and then we stayed there for the next decade, added so much more
stuff but always found a way to delete stuff so we didn't get bloated.

But all that said, you need to be specific about what perf you care 
about.  These days the kernel is far more complicated, NUMA etc, 
and you might care about parallel make (I doubt it) or you might care
about Oracle or something like that.

--lm

[*] http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/lmbench-usenix.pdf

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 06:57:41PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> But all that said, you need to be specific about what perf you care 
> about.  These days the kernel is far more complicated, NUMA etc, 
> and you might care about parallel make (I doubt it) or you might care
> about Oracle or something like that.

It wouldn't surprise me if Solaris was more scalable for gazillion
dollar SMP machines with a huge number of cores.  That was one of the
reason as I recall why Solaris had a reputation of being slow; being
scalable to big (and much more profitable) servers was considered more
important than the smaller systems that were probably more numerous
(but not nearly as profitable).

					- Ted

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Kevin Bowling]

I am surprised how good Sun's technical marketing was for you to think
this.  Linux has scaled better since the early 2000s.  The Solaris
x86-64 port has some real gaffes in it to this day at least as visible
in the OpenSolaris derivative codebases, serialization in the locking
primitives kind of things.

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 06:57:41PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>
>> But all that said, you need to be specific about what perf you care
>> about.  These days the kernel is far more complicated, NUMA etc,
>> and you might care about parallel make (I doubt it) or you might care
>> about Oracle or something like that.
>
> It wouldn't surprise me if Solaris was more scalable for gazillion
> dollar SMP machines with a huge number of cores.  That was one of the
> reason as I recall why Solaris had a reputation of being slow; being
> scalable to big (and much more profitable) servers was considered more
> important than the smaller systems that were probably more numerous
> (but not nearly as profitable).
>
>                                         - Ted

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 09:29:31AM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> I am surprised how good Sun's technical marketing was for you to think
> this.  Linux has scaled better since the early 2000s.  The Solaris
> x86-64 port has some real gaffes in it to this day at least as visible
> in the OpenSolaris derivative codebases, serialization in the locking
> primitives kind of things.

I think the SPARC bias was very apparent.  Sun loved their own chips, to
their detriment IMO.  I have no personal knowledge of the x86_64 efforts,
but I do know about the Sun i386 efforts.  That was very looked down
upon by the powers that were, the main kernel group, etc.  Those poor
guys had an uphill battle to get anything integrated, nobody wanted it.

So it would not surprise me in the slightest if the x86_64 was a half
assed effort without a lot of attention to stuff like performance.
I don't think they wanted Solaris/x86 to be a success, they wanted
SPARC to be a success.

It was that kind of attitude that has pissed me off at every company
I have ever worked for.  I'm fine with marketing to customers but I
hate it when people believe their own marketing.  Internally, I think
you should be very skeptical, judgemental, critical, whatever you want
to call it, if your code sucks or your hardware sucks, don't pretend
it doesn't, own it and fix it.  That's how you win.

> On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 06:57:41PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >>
> >> But all that said, you need to be specific about what perf you care
> >> about.  These days the kernel is far more complicated, NUMA etc,
> >> and you might care about parallel make (I doubt it) or you might care
> >> about Oracle or something like that.
> >
> > It wouldn't surprise me if Solaris was more scalable for gazillion
> > dollar SMP machines with a huge number of cores.  That was one of the
> > reason as I recall why Solaris had a reputation of being slow; being
> > scalable to big (and much more profitable) servers was considered more
> > important than the smaller systems that were probably more numerous
> > (but not nearly as profitable).
> >
> >                                         - Ted

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 12:35 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
> It was that kind of attitude that has pissed me off at every company
> I have ever worked for.  I'm fine with marketing to customers but I
> hate it when people believe their own marketing.  Internally, I think
> you should be very skeptical, judgemental, critical, whatever you want
> to call it, if your code sucks or your hardware sucks, don't pretend
> it doesn't, own it and fix it.  That's how you win.
>

Amen....
ᐧ

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Kevin Bowling]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 4:02 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
> On 8/31/2018 5:58 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>
>>
>> Solaris was Sys Vr4 (which, if I recall correctly, differed from r3
>> largely due to some stuff being ported over from SunOS).  Both the kernel
>> and user space went to a Sys V compat system, it no longer felt anything
>> like BSD.
>>
>
> I would be very interested in anyone's recollections of how Solaris
> eventually turned out performance-wise, say version 9+, compared to other
> operating systems. SunOS, Linux, AIX, etc.

Linux started pulling away fast even on high end systems by the early
2000s.  IBM and SGI dumped a ton of money, knowledge, and talent into
this.  By Linux kernel 2.6 the race was entirely won.

After this HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris persist mainly in mainframe-like
vertical stacks used mainly to host mission critical applications that
are sold in bundles or "solutions"

> I find it's about equal, and even exceeds Linux in terms of it's NUMA
> support and multi-processor support. I need to move some systems away from
> Solaris and off to Linux, and I find it's NUMA support lacking in certain
> ways.

This is pure fantasy.  To understand Linux performance on high core
count and multi-socket machines is to have at least passing knowledge
of Paul McKenney's genius work on RCU [1] and NUMA [2] at Sequent [3]
and on Linux.  IBM bought Sequent, made a favorable patent grant of
RCU for Linux, and the rest history.

There is a single feature I have seen in Solaris NUMA that should be
implemented elsewhere.  It does a micro-benchmark on boot to figure
out the inter-core latency map.  On stupid technology like Intel's
ACPI and Xeon Cluster-on-Die and Sub-NUMA-Clustering, you get bogus
data back in the SRAT table describing where the cores are on the on
chip network it just chops things in half and doesn't reflect where
the cores actually were fused off for yield or binning reasons which
is statistically almost always asymmetric.  On better engineered
technology like IBM's POWER8/9 and OPAL firmware, you get the real
locality information of where cores and cache groups actually are.
Solaris' neat little micro-benchmark would work optimally even on the
brain damaged data from Intel.

[1] http://www2.rdrop.com/~paulmck/RCU/
[2] http://www2.rdrop.com/~paulmck/scalability/
[3] http://www2.rdrop.com/~paulmck/techreports/stingcacm3.1999.08.04a.pdf

Regards,
Kevin

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Arthur Krewat]

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On 9/1/2018 12:27 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>> I find it's about equal, and even exceeds Linux in terms of it's NUMA
>> support and multi-processor support. I need to move some systems away from
>> Solaris and off to Linux, and I find it's NUMA support lacking in certain
>> ways.
> This is pure fantasy.  To understand Linux performance on high core
> count and multi-socket machines is to have at least passing knowledge
> of Paul McKenney's genius work on RCU [1] and NUMA [2] at Sequent [3]
> and on Linux.  IBM bought Sequent, made a favorable patent grant of
> RCU for Linux, and the rest history.

Thanks :) - I'm basing this on Oracle database performance, for the most 
part, and it's weird way of supporting NUMA on Linux in a bass-ackwards 
sort of way. Nothing I see in the latest RedHat/CentOS tells me it even 
cares about NUMA, but maybe that's more of their "we know better than 
you" mentality and it's all hidden under the covers somewhere.

ak

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 01:17:59PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> On 9/1/2018 12:27 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> > > I find it's about equal, and even exceeds Linux in terms of it's NUMA
> > > support and multi-processor support. I need to move some systems away from
> > > Solaris and off to Linux, and I find it's NUMA support lacking in certain
> > > ways.
> > This is pure fantasy.  To understand Linux performance on high core
> > count and multi-socket machines is to have at least passing knowledge
> > of Paul McKenney's genius work on RCU [1] and NUMA [2] at Sequent [3]
> > and on Linux.  IBM bought Sequent, made a favorable patent grant of
> > RCU for Linux, and the rest history.
> 
> Thanks :) - I'm basing this on Oracle database performance, for the most
> part, and it's weird way of supporting NUMA on Linux in a bass-ackwards sort
> of way. Nothing I see in the latest RedHat/CentOS tells me it even cares
> about NUMA, but maybe that's more of their "we know better than you"
> mentality and it's all hidden under the covers somewhere.

It wouldn't surprise me if Linux's NUMA performance is pretty weak
compared to Solaris.  There was an attempt to try to make NUMA work
well on Linux, with a lot of the effort coming from IBM and SGI, but
that effort was overtaken by events.  Back in Sequent's day, the
remote to local memory latency was ten to one, so making the system
NUMA aware was critical.  But by early 2000's, the remote to local
ratio was under 3:1 (or 2:1) for 4 socket systems, and with AMD's
"Sufficiently Uniform Memory Organization" (SUMO), the ratio was under
1.5:1 or less.

The main reason for this was that Windows was (and as far as I know,
still is) NUMA oblivious.  So x86 chip and motherboard designers
solved the problem, by brute foruce, in hardware.  So by 2003 or 2004,
the Linux Scalability Effort had more or less petered out.  (You can
see the leftover remnants at http://lse.sourceforge.net)

Fundamentally, the economics of 4 socket and higher machines was such
that for many workloads, scale out was much cheaper than scale up.  So
why buy super-expensive IBM X440, x450, and x460 servers, which were
huge cabinets connected by one or more "scalability cables" (sometimes
referred to as the "scalability bottleneck"), when most of the time,
you could just buy a rack of 2U x86 servers which would be much, much
cheaper?

There were certainly workloads this wasn't applicable, of course.  But
when Sun was selling Sun 10k's to web startups during the dot com
boom, and they were using it to serve web traffic, they probably had
too much VC money to burn, because that was *not* the most cost
effective way to do things.

Don't get me wrong; the Read Copy Update (RCU) technique was certainly
very important, and is responsible for much of Linux's SMP scalability
today.  But these days, when you can get up to 28 cores (56 threads)
on a single socket, the need for more than 2 socket systems is already
somewhat niche, and by the time you get to more than 4 sockets, it's
positively microscopic.  As a result, NUMA support on Linux is
certainly not as strong as it could be, and it wouldn't surprise me
that Solaris has developed much better ways of handling the behemoths
such as Sun Enterprise 10k.

					- Ted

P.S.  IBM made the RCU patent available for any GPL code, well before
Sun decided on the CDDL for Solaris.  So if Sun management had chosen
GPL, they could have used RCU....

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Kevin Bowling]

On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 3:19 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 01:17:59PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>> On 9/1/2018 12:27 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>> > > I find it's about equal, and even exceeds Linux in terms of it's NUMA
>> > > support and multi-processor support. I need to move some systems away from
>> > > Solaris and off to Linux, and I find it's NUMA support lacking in certain
>> > > ways.
>> > This is pure fantasy.  To understand Linux performance on high core
>> > count and multi-socket machines is to have at least passing knowledge
>> > of Paul McKenney's genius work on RCU [1] and NUMA [2] at Sequent [3]
>> > and on Linux.  IBM bought Sequent, made a favorable patent grant of
>> > RCU for Linux, and the rest history.
>>
>> Thanks :) - I'm basing this on Oracle database performance, for the most
>> part, and it's weird way of supporting NUMA on Linux in a bass-ackwards sort
>> of way. Nothing I see in the latest RedHat/CentOS tells me it even cares
>> about NUMA, but maybe that's more of their "we know better than you"
>> mentality and it's all hidden under the covers somewhere.
>
> It wouldn't surprise me if Linux's NUMA performance is pretty weak
> compared to Solaris.  There was an attempt to try to make NUMA work
> well on Linux, with a lot of the effort coming from IBM and SGI, but
> that effort was overtaken by events.  Back in Sequent's day, the
> remote to local memory latency was ten to one, so making the system
> NUMA aware was critical.  But by early 2000's, the remote to local
> ratio was under 3:1 (or 2:1) for 4 socket systems, and with AMD's
> "Sufficiently Uniform Memory Organization" (SUMO), the ratio was under
> 1.5:1 or less.

Sorry this is just bogus about being weak compared to Solaris.  Are
you looking back with rosy glasses or have you scanned the code in the
past couple years?  I have and there is nothing particularly special
about Solaris internals here or elsewhere.  In fact, there are a lot
of pessimization all over the place.  As Larry said, a lot of folks in
the Linux community clearly cared about performance.  Although the
Solaris code is fairly clean It's not clear Sun valued performance at
all.  A stroll through arch/*/include/asm/ was enough to convince me
of Larry's claims.  I'm not a Linux fanboy but credit goes where it's
due.

Solaris has lgroups, which are a clean design but that is the extent
of its NUMA support, one shot at placement and scheduling.  Linux has
a NUMA allocator, aware scheduler, NUMA-optimized spinlocks and
mutexes, various subsystems correctly use the primitives, and can use
cgroups to contain or gang things.  There is a userland policy tool
called numad that tries to add some additional runtime affinity and
movement policy decisions.

I agree that architecturally Linux NUMA is nowhere near where Sequent
and especially SGI was.  And the reasons you cite are valid, Linux
implementation is good for maybe 8-16 sockets of modern core count
with a much tighter off chip network than the big dogs were building.

Keep in mind IBM wants to sell RockHoppers and E980s (4 drawers, 16
sockets, 768 threads) for dedicated Linux use which have similar
north/south and east/west off chip networks.  They have a lot of very
talented people on the firmware, kernel, compilers to make these
things work fast, including Paul.

> The main reason for this was that Windows was (and as far as I know,
> still is) NUMA oblivious.  So x86 chip and motherboard designers
> solved the problem, by brute foruce, in hardware.  So by 2003 or 2004,
> the Linux Scalability Effort had more or less petered out.  (You can
> see the leftover remnants at http://lse.sourceforge.net)

Windows' NUMA support is on par with Solaris insofar as there is
domain aware memory allocator and scheduler hierarchy that takes the
domain (and SMT etc) into account.  What Windows lacks is the finely
tuned concurrency primitives and everything else Linux has done..
which Solaris lacks as well.  I'm not even talking about RCU (or epoch
based reclamation or proxy collection or hazard pointers, at least one
of which is not patent encumbered), I'm just talking about the quality
of primitives like spinlocks and mutex and rwlock.  There are big
tradeoffs to the implementations of these in terms of fairness,
progress guarantees, and thread scalability.  Linux leads the pack by
a long shot in this department.

Where you start going beyond Linux-like NUMA IMO is when you get
Irix-like features of page copying, migration, and multiple advanced
placement policies.

> Fundamentally, the economics of 4 socket and higher machines was such
> that for many workloads, scale out was much cheaper than scale up.  So
> why buy super-expensive IBM X440, x450, and x460 servers, which were
> huge cabinets connected by one or more "scalability cables" (sometimes
> referred to as the "scalability bottleneck"), when most of the time,
> you could just buy a rack of 2U x86 servers which would be much, much
> cheaper?

Agreed, this is why x86 has dominated the server market for a long time.

> There were certainly workloads this wasn't applicable, of course.  But
> when Sun was selling Sun 10k's to web startups during the dot com
> boom, and they were using it to serve web traffic, they probably had
> too much VC money to burn, because that was *not* the most cost
> effective way to do things.

Agreed.  Those big margins must have caused them to take their eye off
what mattered right at the time Linux was getting some momentum from
the big HW vendors.

> Don't get me wrong; the Read Copy Update (RCU) technique was certainly
> very important, and is responsible for much of Linux's SMP scalability
> today.  But these days, when you can get up to 28 cores (56 threads)
> on a single socket, the need for more than 2 socket systems is already
> somewhat niche, and by the time you get to more than 4 sockets, it's
> positively microscopic.  As a result, NUMA support on Linux is
> certainly not as strong as it could be, and it wouldn't surprise me
> that Solaris has developed much better ways of handling the behemoths
> such as Sun Enterprise 10k.

The E10k was only a 64-core machine on a tight backplane compared to
other large systems.  It didn't have any of the pressing needs that
Sequent and SGI did with multi-drawer interconnects to drive
excellence in NUMA.

These are strange times.  Intel's been putting out some real doozy
chips.  The mesh in Skylake is a partial improvement over the dual
rings of Haswell (though they did some goofy things to increase
latency in undesirable ways), and they aren't going to continue to
brute force it like IBM did with their 17 metal layer process node..
many SKUs in Cascade Lake will be a dual die design and cost a
hilarious amount of money.  AMD's EPYC is really bad in this
department too, one EPYC behaves identically to a 4 socket system with
extremely poor inter-die latency [1].  I think POWER9 is universally
better and the high bin chips (22 core, 88 thread, mega cache) are
only around $2500 compared to Skylake's absurd $12,000.  POWER9 is a
single on chip NUMA domain for 24 cores.  Google publicly stated they
are using it for GPU servers, and that all their monorepo is built for
multiple ISAs.  Through the grapevine I've heard gmail is running on
POWER9 as well now.  That is pretty competent, the reason Intel is
sucking so bad is because people allowed themselves such lock in.  A
hyperscaler should be able to change between a couple ISAs as needed
between purchasing cycles.

>                                         - Ted
>
> P.S.  IBM made the RCU patent available for any GPL code, well before
> Sun decided on the CDDL for Solaris.  So if Sun management had chosen
> GPL, they could have used RCU...

True.  There is also at least one unencumbered strategy such as epoch
based reclamation which was known about around that time [2]

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-infinity-fabric-latency-ddr4-2400-v-2666-a-snapshot/
[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-579.pdf

Regards,
Kevin

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 10:05:06PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> 
> Sorry this is just bogus about being weak compared to Solaris.  Are
> you looking back with rosy glasses or have you scanned the code in the
> past couple years?  I have and there is nothing particularly special
> about Solaris internals here or elsewhere.

I haven't looked at Solaris code; I had just *assumed* that if they
were selling million dollar E10k's, they would have had NUMA support
at *least* as good as SGI's Irix.  And it would have been an excuse
for their pathetic performance on UP and 2-4 SMP systems.

> Keep in mind IBM wants to sell RockHoppers and E980s (4 drawers, 16
> sockets, 768 threads) for dedicated Linux use which have similar
> north/south and east/west off chip networks.  They have a lot of very
> talented people on the firmware, kernel, compilers to make these
> things work fast, including Paul.
> ...
> Where you start going beyond Linux-like NUMA IMO is when you get
> Irix-like features of page copying, migration, and multiple advanced
> placement policies.

One thing to consider is that IBM really only cared about optimizing
hardware for DB2, Oracle, and Webshpere.  That's one of the reason why
you didn't see much in the way of innovative file system work, ala
ZFS.  There was no business justification for pouring 100+ engineer
years to develop a next-generation file systesm --- and they had
already done that once already for GPFS, a cluster file system.  As
far as local disk file system was concerned, the only real business
value it had was to serve as a program loader for DB2 and Websphere.  :-)

(I'm exagerating a little for effect, but *only* a little.)

So as far as NUMA was concerned, there was almost certainly not have
been much perceived business value in having sophisticated
auto-migration for arbitrary workloads in the kernel.  Something basic
which was good enough for Oracle, DB2, etc., was all that would be
needed.  (And if you needed to hire consultants from IBM Global
Services to mind-meld with the configuration documentation in order to
get the best out of your Rockhopper.... well, shucks, darn.  :-)

At IBM the business people really did make the funding decisions of
what to work on.  ZFS could have never happened at IBM because no one
would have thought that a even a tiny number of IBM's current or
potential customer base would abandon AIX or Linux and switch to
Solaris, or buy Sun hardware instead of IBM hardware --- just for the
sake of ZFS.  And that's how decision-makers at IBM really thought.
(And to be fair to those decision-makers, IBM is still in business as
a free-standing business --- and Sun is not.)

  			     	     	- Ted

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Kevin Bowling]

On Sun, Sep 2, 2018 at 12:43 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 10:05:06PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>>
>> Sorry this is just bogus about being weak compared to Solaris.  Are
>> you looking back with rosy glasses or have you scanned the code in the
>> past couple years?  I have and there is nothing particularly special
>> about Solaris internals here or elsewhere.
>
> I haven't looked at Solaris code; I had just *assumed* that if they
> were selling million dollar E10k's, they would have had NUMA support
> at *least* as good as SGI's Irix.  And it would have been an excuse
> for their pathetic performance on UP and 2-4 SMP systems.

One would hope so, but that was the strategy that got them eaten by a
grue.  Another funny anecdote about this aloofness.. Linux on sparc64
uses the Relaxed Memory Order mode that the hardware offers .
Solaris.. Total Store Order.  There are tons of things like this in
the code that blow my mind.  I would have been pissed if I were on the
hardware side of SPARC.

>
>> Keep in mind IBM wants to sell RockHoppers and E980s (4 drawers, 16
>> sockets, 768 threads) for dedicated Linux use which have similar
>> north/south and east/west off chip networks.  They have a lot of very
>> talented people on the firmware, kernel, compilers to make these
>> things work fast, including Paul.
>> ...
>> Where you start going beyond Linux-like NUMA IMO is when you get
>> Irix-like features of page copying, migration, and multiple advanced
>> placement policies.
>
> One thing to consider is that IBM really only cared about optimizing
> hardware for DB2, Oracle, and Webshpere.  That's one of the reason why
> you didn't see much in the way of innovative file system work, ala
> ZFS.  There was no business justification for pouring 100+ engineer
> years to develop a next-generation file systesm --- and they had
> already done that once already for GPFS, a cluster file system.  As
> far as local disk file system was concerned, the only real business
> value it had was to serve as a program loader for DB2 and Websphere.  :-)
>
> (I'm exagerating a little for effect, but *only* a little.)

Hmm, I think they've been pretty earnest at wanting to be 2+ years
ahead of the general market with POWER for as long as I can see, lots
of HPC money has been subsidizing that.  Depends on the workload but
bus and memory bandwidth right now with PCIe Gen4 and NvLink can
really cut down on server sprawl.  I've met with the GM/chief
architect and they see OpenPOWER positioned as a full frontal
competitor to Intel Xeon.  I'm fairly disappointed in my
contemporaries for not recognizing the value of a completely open
source firmware and on chip controller stack; especially after the
recent snafu where Intel changed the microcode license to disallow
benchmarks and claimed it was an accident.

Your statements make sense to me with respect to AIX, as Linux has
been the main effort since the 2000s.  GPFS looks neat, I wish it were
open or at least internals documented well enough to study the
implementation academically.

>
> So as far as NUMA was concerned, there was almost certainly not have
> been much perceived business value in having sophisticated
> auto-migration for arbitrary workloads in the kernel.  Something basic
> which was good enough for Oracle, DB2, etc., was all that would be
> needed.  (And if you needed to hire consultants from IBM Global
> Services to mind-meld with the configuration documentation in order to
> get the best out of your Rockhopper.... well, shucks, darn.  :-)

That's probably the dirty little secret.  It's long been profitable to
carefully plan software interrupt handlers, user threads, and memory
allocation even on pedestrian servers if they are running a fixed
function.  I guess Google's Borg and the new workalikes could do
semi-automagic things with cgroups these days.  There is evidence of
people getting pretty crazy with it when we see things like Intel
cache allocation features.

> At IBM the business people really did make the funding decisions of
> what to work on.  ZFS could have never happened at IBM because no one
> would have thought that a even a tiny number of IBM's current or
> potential customer base would abandon AIX or Linux and switch to
> Solaris, or buy Sun hardware instead of IBM hardware --- just for the
> sake of ZFS.  And that's how decision-makers at IBM really thought.
> (And to be fair to those decision-makers, IBM is still in business as
> a free-standing business --- and Sun is not.)

Agreed, one of these companies is doing pretty well with a fat
dividend yield, that other has basically been dismantled for all but a
couple remaining desirable platform control points like Java and
MySQL.

Many things in tech are happy accidents and a small number of
motivated people at the right place and time.  A Sun engineer admitted
on some video I've seen that the green light was really given for ZFS
because they got stumped by some UFS bugs.. once enough of ZFS was
written to test the end to end checksumming features they found out
some of these heisenbugs were LSI HBA and disk firmware issues :o)

Surveying some of these filesystems.. JFS2 is a decent, nowhere near
the capabilities of ZFS but even today it's not in dire need of
replacement.. I suspect another issue complementary to your point is
the standalone storage business is many $B of revenue.  ESS/DS8000 and
the like are preferred revenue.  IBM and HP were more in the SAN game
than Sun and SGI who let the customers configure systems themselves be
used as storage (Sun was using VxFS for a long time, SGI had some CXFS
things IIRC).  Tru64 had a pretty interesting filesystem on paper,
curious if you ever looked at its design since they open sourced it.

Regards,
Kevin

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Gilles Gravier]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6720 bytes --]

This link :
https://vetusware.com/download/SunOS%20Source%20Code%204.1.3/?id=13475
seems to have the right file (registration required, but it's free, use a
disposable email).

Beats my having to find a SCSI adaptor, a QIC-150 drive, and trying to read
my old QIC-150 tape with the source code on it...

Gilles

Le mar. 4 sept. 2018 à 13:48, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> a
écrit :

> On Sun, Sep 2, 2018 at 12:43 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 10:05:06PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> >>
> >> Sorry this is just bogus about being weak compared to Solaris.  Are
> >> you looking back with rosy glasses or have you scanned the code in the
> >> past couple years?  I have and there is nothing particularly special
> >> about Solaris internals here or elsewhere.
> >
> > I haven't looked at Solaris code; I had just *assumed* that if they
> > were selling million dollar E10k's, they would have had NUMA support
> > at *least* as good as SGI's Irix.  And it would have been an excuse
> > for their pathetic performance on UP and 2-4 SMP systems.
>
> One would hope so, but that was the strategy that got them eaten by a
> grue.  Another funny anecdote about this aloofness.. Linux on sparc64
> uses the Relaxed Memory Order mode that the hardware offers .
> Solaris.. Total Store Order.  There are tons of things like this in
> the code that blow my mind.  I would have been pissed if I were on the
> hardware side of SPARC.
>
> >
> >> Keep in mind IBM wants to sell RockHoppers and E980s (4 drawers, 16
> >> sockets, 768 threads) for dedicated Linux use which have similar
> >> north/south and east/west off chip networks.  They have a lot of very
> >> talented people on the firmware, kernel, compilers to make these
> >> things work fast, including Paul.
> >> ...
> >> Where you start going beyond Linux-like NUMA IMO is when you get
> >> Irix-like features of page copying, migration, and multiple advanced
> >> placement policies.
> >
> > One thing to consider is that IBM really only cared about optimizing
> > hardware for DB2, Oracle, and Webshpere.  That's one of the reason why
> > you didn't see much in the way of innovative file system work, ala
> > ZFS.  There was no business justification for pouring 100+ engineer
> > years to develop a next-generation file systesm --- and they had
> > already done that once already for GPFS, a cluster file system.  As
> > far as local disk file system was concerned, the only real business
> > value it had was to serve as a program loader for DB2 and Websphere.  :-)
> >
> > (I'm exagerating a little for effect, but *only* a little.)
>
> Hmm, I think they've been pretty earnest at wanting to be 2+ years
> ahead of the general market with POWER for as long as I can see, lots
> of HPC money has been subsidizing that.  Depends on the workload but
> bus and memory bandwidth right now with PCIe Gen4 and NvLink can
> really cut down on server sprawl.  I've met with the GM/chief
> architect and they see OpenPOWER positioned as a full frontal
> competitor to Intel Xeon.  I'm fairly disappointed in my
> contemporaries for not recognizing the value of a completely open
> source firmware and on chip controller stack; especially after the
> recent snafu where Intel changed the microcode license to disallow
> benchmarks and claimed it was an accident.
>
> Your statements make sense to me with respect to AIX, as Linux has
> been the main effort since the 2000s.  GPFS looks neat, I wish it were
> open or at least internals documented well enough to study the
> implementation academically.
>
> >
> > So as far as NUMA was concerned, there was almost certainly not have
> > been much perceived business value in having sophisticated
> > auto-migration for arbitrary workloads in the kernel.  Something basic
> > which was good enough for Oracle, DB2, etc., was all that would be
> > needed.  (And if you needed to hire consultants from IBM Global
> > Services to mind-meld with the configuration documentation in order to
> > get the best out of your Rockhopper.... well, shucks, darn.  :-)
>
> That's probably the dirty little secret.  It's long been profitable to
> carefully plan software interrupt handlers, user threads, and memory
> allocation even on pedestrian servers if they are running a fixed
> function.  I guess Google's Borg and the new workalikes could do
> semi-automagic things with cgroups these days.  There is evidence of
> people getting pretty crazy with it when we see things like Intel
> cache allocation features.
>
> > At IBM the business people really did make the funding decisions of
> > what to work on.  ZFS could have never happened at IBM because no one
> > would have thought that a even a tiny number of IBM's current or
> > potential customer base would abandon AIX or Linux and switch to
> > Solaris, or buy Sun hardware instead of IBM hardware --- just for the
> > sake of ZFS.  And that's how decision-makers at IBM really thought.
> > (And to be fair to those decision-makers, IBM is still in business as
> > a free-standing business --- and Sun is not.)
>
> Agreed, one of these companies is doing pretty well with a fat
> dividend yield, that other has basically been dismantled for all but a
> couple remaining desirable platform control points like Java and
> MySQL.
>
> Many things in tech are happy accidents and a small number of
> motivated people at the right place and time.  A Sun engineer admitted
> on some video I've seen that the green light was really given for ZFS
> because they got stumped by some UFS bugs.. once enough of ZFS was
> written to test the end to end checksumming features they found out
> some of these heisenbugs were LSI HBA and disk firmware issues :o)
>
> Surveying some of these filesystems.. JFS2 is a decent, nowhere near
> the capabilities of ZFS but even today it's not in dire need of
> replacement.. I suspect another issue complementary to your point is
> the standalone storage business is many $B of revenue.  ESS/DS8000 and
> the like are preferred revenue.  IBM and HP were more in the SAN game
> than Sun and SGI who let the customers configure systems themselves be
> used as storage (Sun was using VxFS for a long time, SGI had some CXFS
> things IIRC).  Tru64 had a pretty interesting filesystem on paper,
> curious if you ever looked at its design since they open sourced it.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin
>


-- 
*Gilles Gravier*  - Gilles@Gravier.org
GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437
Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0x8DE6D026
<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0x8DE6D026&op=index>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Henry Bent]

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On Tue, Sep 4, 2018, 13:40 Gilles Gravier <gilles@gravier.org> wrote:

> This link :
> https://vetusware.com/download/SunOS%20Source%20Code%204.1.3/?id=13475
> seems to have the right file (registration required, but it's free, use a
> disposable email).
>
> Beats my having to find a SCSI adaptor, a QIC-150 drive, and trying to
> read my old QIC-150 tape with the source code on it...
>
> Gilles
>

I feel like we've been through this before on this list, but perhaps it
bears repeating: just because you can find source (or binaries, or CD
images, etc.) on the internet, that doesn't make it the least bit legal.
That is clearly the case here. Sadly, there are even higher profile sites
like the Internet Archive that have this problem too.  The concept of
"abandonware" has no legal footing whatsoever.

-Henry

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Gilles Gravier]

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(Henri, you're in copy of this again, because first time I did a Reply
instead of Reply to list/all. Sorry.)

Le mar. 4 sept. 2018 à 19:45, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> a écrit :

>
>
> On Tue, Sep 4, 2018, 13:40 Gilles Gravier <gilles@gravier.org> wrote:
>
>> This link :
>> https://vetusware.com/download/SunOS%20Source%20Code%204.1.3/?id=13475
>> seems to have the right file (registration required, but it's free, use a
>> disposable email).
>>
>> Beats my having to find a SCSI adaptor, a QIC-150 drive, and trying to
>> read my old QIC-150 tape with the source code on it...
>>
>> Gilles
>>
>
> I feel like we've been through this before on this list, but perhaps it
> bears repeating: just because you can find source (or binaries, or CD
> images, etc.) on the internet, that doesn't make it the least bit legal.
> That is clearly the case here. Sadly, there are even higher profile sites
> like the Internet Archive that have this problem too.  The concept of
> "abandonware" has no legal footing whatsoever.
>
> -Henry
>

Oh I definitely know the sources aren't officially accessible. By the way,
I had copies of them (my QIC tape) when I was a student. I still have the
QIC.

It's the common example that I use to tell people that opensourcing
software makes it more secure because the good guys have access to the
source code at the same time as the bad guys, which gives them a fair
chance to fix bugs before the bad guys use them.

With closed source (SunOS, VMS...) the good guys don't have access to the
source code... but the bad guys will always (either by paying somebody
enough to make a copy for them, or by finding them on some non legitimate
place). As a student I had the source of SunOS (4.1.3) but also VMS (on a
few TK-50 tapes).

For me, that vetusware site is certainly not legitimate... but since I have
the QIC tape at home, I just used it as an easy alternative to having to
get the hardware to read my tape back in working order...

I certainly do not consider it a legally approved way of distributing code
which is, as we all agree, NOT open source.

Gilles

-- 
*Gilles Gravier*  - Gilles@Gravier.org
GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437
Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0x8DE6D026
<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0x8DE6D026&op=index>

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 9/5/2018 2:31 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> It's the common example that I use to tell people that opensourcing 
> software makes it more secure because the good guys have access to the 
> source code at the same time as the bad guys, which gives them a fair 
> chance to fix bugs before the bad guys use them.


Bash/Shellshock kinda proves that premise incorrect, although it's 
pretty much the worst-case example, but still...  ;)

Announced in 2014, it goes back to September 1989 (according to a 
wikipedia article, so I'm not sure about that date's accuracy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html?vendor_id=33
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17/IBM-AIX.html?vendor_id=14
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/20/HP-Hp-ux.html?vendor_id=10
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19755/Oracle-Solaris.html?vendor_id=93

It could be argued that the above CVE results are either under-reported 
(closed-source), or over-reported (open-source). Or vice-versa ;)

ak

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 6:55 AM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

>
>
> On 9/5/2018 2:31 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> > It's the common example that I use to tell people that opensourcing
> > software makes it more secure because the good guys have access to the
> > source code at the same time as the bad guys, which gives them a fair
> > chance to fix bugs before the bad guys use them.
>
>
> Bash/Shellshock kinda proves that premise incorrect, although it's
> pretty much the worst-case example, but still...  ;)
>

I'm not sure it does. It proves that bugs aren't instantly found, true. It
doesn't provide perfection, but does make it easier to find / fix bugs
before the bad guys. How long would such a bug have languished it if were
buried inside of DCL.B32 instead of being out in the open?

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/5/18 11:26 AM, Warner Losh wrote:

>     On 9/5/2018 2:31 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>     > It's the common example that I use to tell people that opensourcing
>     > software makes it more secure because the good guys have access to the
>     > source code at the same time as the bad guys, which gives them a fair
>     > chance to fix bugs before the bad guys use them.
> 
> 
>     Bash/Shellshock kinda proves that premise incorrect, although it's
>     pretty much the worst-case example, but still...  ;)
> 
> 
> I'm not sure it does. It proves that bugs aren't instantly found, true. It
> doesn't provide perfection, but does make it easier to find / fix bugs
> before the bad guys. How long would such a bug have languished it if were
> buried inside of DCL.B32 instead of being out in the open?

It proves that if there is someone who has an idea, or who thinks about a
thing in new ways, he can verify his suspicions without too much trouble.
The barrier to investigation is lowered.

Chet


-- 
``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/

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 9/5/2018 11:26 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> I'm not sure it does. It proves that bugs aren't instantly found, 
> true. It doesn't provide perfection, but does make it easier to find / 
> fix bugs before the bad guys. How long would such a bug have 
> languished it if were buried inside of DCL.B32 instead of being out in 
> the open?

It depends on how it was found in the first place. A quick Google 
doesn't tell me much about exactly how it was discovered initially. Nor 
is there any background information that says it wasn't (or was) 
exploited before the announcement. Was it discovered because someone 
(Stéphane Chazelas) was just reading open source code? Or was he trying 
to do something innocent and it broke in such a way that it was obvious 
bash was doing something bad? Or was he investigating a break-in and 
found the vector? Serious questions, I'd love to hear from anyone who 
knows more.

My original point remains: Open Source doesn't necessarily mean more 
secure if a really bad exploit was allowed to exist for 25 years.

No offense intended to anyone on this list.

ak

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2018, Gilles Gravier wrote:

> (Henri, you're in copy of this again, because first time I did a Reply 
> instead of Reply to list/all. Sorry.)

One of my pet hates is people who use "Reply All" because either they are 
too lazy to edit the Reply (and they top-post, too), or the list is set up 
that way.

I really don't need my own personal copy, as well as a list copy.

Oh, and people who are too lazy to trim their replies too, because they
are encouraged to top-post.

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Tony Finch]

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> On 2 Sep 2018, at 06:05, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote:
> 
> The E10k was only a 64-core machine on a tight backplane compared to
> other large systems.  It didn't have any of the pressing needs that
> Sequent and SGI did with multi-drawer interconnects to drive
> excellence in NUMA.

When I started work at Cambridge in 2002 our central supercomputer was being replaced with a cluster of Sun Fire E15K machines with a fancy interconnect - it topped out at position 199 on the top500 list https://www.top500.org/list/2003/06/?page=2 with a 300 core configuration. It looks like they never managed to get the whole thing working as a single cluster since the other two thirds of the installation had positions 200 and 201! (The Nov. 2002 top500 list has it in 6 x 144 core shards.) Here’s a news item about it: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-expands-supercomputer-effort/

> True.  There is also at least one unencumbered strategy such as epoch
> based reclamation which was known about around that time [2]
> 
> [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-579.pdf

The big benchmarks in this lovely thesis were run on one of the E15K supercomputer boxes :-)

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot@dotat.at>  http://dotat.at


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Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Henry Bent

    > just because you can find source (or binaries, or CD images, etc.) on
    > the internet, that doesn't make it the least bit legal. ... The concept
    > of "abandonware" has no legal footing whatsoever.

True; but if all the copies of a particular item are discarded, one can make
all the lawyers on the planet as happy as clams, and it won't do a bit of
good. Save the bits, _then_ work out the legal issues, is my thinking on
priorities.

     Noel

(PS: 'Internet' is spelled with a capital; there are many internets, but only
one Internet, just as there are many white houses, but only one White House. If
the technical community, which _does_ understand the difference, can't get it's
act together, how can we expect the media, etc, to do the right thing?)

Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> (PS: 'Internet' is spelled with a capital; there are many internets, but 
> only one Internet, just as there are many white houses, but only one 
> White House. If the technical community, which _does_ understand the 
> difference, can't get it's act together, how can we expect the media, 
> etc, to do the right thing?)

Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

At every technical lecture I do, I insist upon Internet, but the younger 
generation these days think that they invented it because of Google 
browsing etc.

-- Dave, in a grouchy mood having having three teeth pulled out