The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Subject: [TUHS] Minor Milestone: Venix 86 "user mode" interpreter
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2018 20:22:58 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfrY-Tfo3d5_-yKVCNpSRnozx1ywU9tkFaRLnGfe25Dwjg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

Today I reached a minor milestone with my 'Venix restoration project' that
I talked about months ago. I ran a Venix 86 binary (sync) to successful
completion on my FreeBSD/amd64 box (though none of the code should be too
FreeBSD specific).

So, I hacked https://github.com/tkchia/reenigne.git to remove the DOS
loader and emulator and to add a Venix system call loader and emulator, or
at least the start of one. I've also added FP instruction parsing, but it's
100% wrong (it just parses the instructions and does nothing else to decode
or implement them). With this, I'm able to load OMAGIC binaries from the
extant venix 86 distributions and run them. The only one that runs
successfully is sync() since I've not yet implemented argument passing or
any of the other 58 system calls :). NMAGIC should be pretty quick after
this.

This is but a step on the road to getting the Venix compiler running so I
can see how much of the system I can recreate from the v7 and other sources
that are on TUHS.

Not sure who, if anybody, cares about this stuff. I thought people here
might be interested. I've pushed the results to
https://github.com/bsdimp/venix if you care. This program is in the
tools/86sim directory. There's also a doc directory where I document the
Venix 86 ABI, as well as doing a very deep-dive into a disassembled
/bin/sync to discover what I can from it (turns out, it's quite a lot).

So, I thought I'd share this here. Don't know if anybody else is
interested, but you never know until you tell people about stuff...

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180411/a46a562d/attachment.html>


             reply	other threads:[~2018-04-12  2:22 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2018-04-12  2:22 Warner Losh [this message]
2018-04-12  3:30 ` Nigel Williams
2018-04-12  4:23   ` Warner Losh
2018-04-12  4:52   ` Jim Carpenter
2018-04-12 13:22     ` Warner Losh
2018-04-12  8:10 ` Mutiny

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=CANCZdfrY-Tfo3d5_-yKVCNpSRnozx1ywU9tkFaRLnGfe25Dwjg@mail.gmail.com \
    --to=imp@bsdimp.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).