[TUHS] UNIX v7 projects

[TUHS] UNIX v7 projects

[Hellwig.Geisse]

Hi all,

I thought that you possibly could be interested in
two projects, a small one that I did over a year ago
and a more recent one, which is currently under active
development.

In order to become acquainted with the old UNIX sources
as well as the behaviour of such a system running on old
(but simulated) hardware I figured out how to feed Keith
Bostic's original v7 tape images into Robert M. Supnik's
PDP-11 simulator so that the original bootstrap procedure
(described in "Setting Up Unix - Seventh Edition") could
be carried out exactly as written. In addition to that I
wrote a little program which traverses the root directory
of the simulated disk and extracts its contents recursively
(creating the same structure and files in the host's file
system). I copied all the needed software and a HOWTO into
a distribution package which can be found at

http://telexx.mni.fh-giessen.de/PDP11-UNIX

I did this little project as a "warm-up" for another and
quite a bit bigger project: porting UNIX Seventh Edition
to a modern RISC-like microprocessor (named ECO32). This
processor and a few peripherals are simulated for now,
but we intend to transform it into real hardware (we are
thinking of an FPGA implementation). These of course are
dreams of the future; what we have already is this:
 - an ECO32 simulator
 - an ECO32 back-end for the LCC compiler
 - an ECO32 assembler/linker/loader
 - a UNIX 7th Edition kernel ported to ECO32
We are working on a port of many of the commands; the
standard library and the shell are ready and waiting to
be integrated.

The homepage of this project is

http://telexx.mni.fh-giessen.de/ECO32

You are welcome to download the project in its current
state; don't expect anything user friendly though ;-)

If you have any questions regarding these two projects,
feel free to ask.

- Hellwig