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* [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
@ 2020-09-15 23:28 Chris Hanson
  2020-09-15 23:55 ` Gregg Levine
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Chris Hanson @ 2020-09-15 23:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

I have an MVME121 that I’d like to run some stuff on. I’m planning what I’ll need to do to port MINIX 1.5 but since this has a 68451 segmented MMU, I’d like to actually make use of it.

Have any historical sources been published for UNIX on the various 68010 + 68451 systems from the early-mid 1980s? I’m curious how they used segmented MMUs.

I figure at minimum I could have several segments set up to enforce protections and a stable per-process address space, but it’d be good to have an example.

  — Chris


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
  2020-09-15 23:28 [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems? Chris Hanson
@ 2020-09-15 23:55 ` Gregg Levine
  2020-09-16  3:05   ` Chris Hanson
  2020-09-16  5:21 ` Arno Griffioen
  2020-09-16  8:53 ` Al Kossow
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread
From: Gregg Levine @ 2020-09-15 23:55 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs, Chris Hanson

Hello!
Chris I have one of the later ones, a 133 in fact, and I've been
trying to find what I could run on it. Never mind a case for it, plus
power supply and stuff....  Can you share, off list of course, where
you'd gotten it?
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 7:49 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net> wrote:
>
> I have an MVME121 that I’d like to run some stuff on. I’m planning what I’ll need to do to port MINIX 1.5 but since this has a 68451 segmented MMU, I’d like to actually make use of it.
>
> Have any historical sources been published for UNIX on the various 68010 + 68451 systems from the early-mid 1980s? I’m curious how they used segmented MMUs.
>
> I figure at minimum I could have several segments set up to enforce protections and a stable per-process address space, but it’d be good to have an example.
>
>   — Chris
>

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
  2020-09-15 23:55 ` Gregg Levine
@ 2020-09-16  3:05   ` Chris Hanson
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Chris Hanson @ 2020-09-16  3:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Gregg Levine; +Cc: tuhs

On Sep 15, 2020, at 4:55 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8@gmail.com> wrote:

> Chris I have one of the later ones, a 133 in fact, and I've been
> trying to find what I could run on it. Never mind a case for it, plus
> power supply and stuff....  Can you share, off list of course, where
> you'd gotten it?

Oh, I don’t mind sharing on-list! I just bought the board—and a system controller, and some additional RAM boards, as well as the VME chassis with built-in PSU—on eBay. Lots of sellers are willing to make pretty good deals. There’s barely anything I paid over US$100 for, and I’ve only been collecting the VME stuff for a couple years.

In theory you should be able to use any VME or VXI chassis for most VME hardware. What’s hard to find are manuals for anything not on Bitsavers[1], or software to run on it. At least NetBSD has been ported to the common 68030+ and PowerPC VME boards, and an old version of OpenBSD runs on the common 88K ones. Alas the 133 doesn’t have an MMU so it’s going to be a bit more restricted.

One of the reasons to run MINIX 1.5 on my MVME121 is that it should be nice and fast on a 10MHz system with 8.5MB of RAM (including 4KB of cache), and as a V7 UNIX clone with an ANSI C compiler it’ll be easy to write for and port to. It’ll probably also be nicer than running one of the first few versions of Motorola System V/68 on it too, since I think that’s SVR1…

Your 133 should also be straightforward to port MINIX to as well, since all the hardware’s simple, standard, and documented in the manual (plus data books).

My plan was to start with MINIX 1.5 on Atari ST under Hatari, then just write some device drivers and a boot loader to replace the ST-specific ones.

  — Chris

[1] Or Artisan Technology Group’s web site; they sell a ton of used VME hardware, and seem to collect what manuals and data sheets they can and provide them as PDF.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
  2020-09-15 23:28 [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems? Chris Hanson
  2020-09-15 23:55 ` Gregg Levine
@ 2020-09-16  5:21 ` Arno Griffioen
  2020-09-16  8:53 ` Al Kossow
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Arno Griffioen @ 2020-09-16  5:21 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 04:28:36PM -0700, Chris Hanson wrote:
> I have an MVME121 that I’d like to run some stuff on. I’m planning what I’ll 
> need to do to port MINIX 1.5 but since this has a 68451 segmented MMU, I’d 
> like to actually make use of it.

Quite doable to adapt MINIX to this. Did a similar thing ages ago while 
still in school on a 68010 machine (not really VME, but similar card-cage
setup) that had a custom MMU built from some SRAM and some control logic on 
it. Used MINIX 1.1 at the time though..

Only had 1MB physical RAM and the MMU could provide a virtual address space 
of 4MB.

Initially ported MINIX to the machine 'as is' from the ST version and then
modified the MINIX kernel to allow it to use the 4MB virtual space and
such.

Because of the bare-bones MMU design it had some interesting quirks that made 
it a good learning experience at the time. (and some very odd serial chips
for the terminals that had their own 'interesting' behaviour but that's
a different story..)

Originally the machine did have a real SVR2 UNIX running on it, but sadly it 
was binary-only, so apart from some dis-assembly of bootstrap bits to learn
how to get MINIX to start on this machine it was not very useful.

> I figure at minimum I could have several segments set up to enforce 
> protections and a stable per-process address space, but it’d be good to 
> have an example.

Yup. You may run into some of the shortcuts in the MINIX kernel when you start
doing MMU work though, especially if you want to separate the kernel
'processes' as well. 

For performance the microkernel architecture of MINIX was violated in a few 
spots, mostly around FS and MM, where one kernel process would/could modify
another's memory without going through the message passing mechanism.

Introduce an MMU and that kinda breaks and needs some cleaning up ;)

As MINIX later on did get a 386 port and cleanups/fixes that may now be a
non-issue on 1.5.

Another option would be Linux/m68k and perhaps starting on the 'nommu'
version that runs on basic 68000's too and seeing how much functionality could 
be used from the 68451 to enhance it. 

Some of the Coldfire CPU's have similar limited MMU's that are supported for 
some functions of basic memory protection in the 'nommu' tree.

As far as real UNIX sources go.. SUN2's were 68010's too although AFAIK
with a custom SUN designed MMU logic? Perhaps some old sources available in 
that corner though.

							Bye, Arno.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
  2020-09-15 23:28 [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems? Chris Hanson
  2020-09-15 23:55 ` Gregg Levine
  2020-09-16  5:21 ` Arno Griffioen
@ 2020-09-16  8:53 ` Al Kossow
  2020-09-16 23:47   ` Dave Horsfall
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread
From: Al Kossow @ 2020-09-16  8:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On 9/15/20 4:28 PM, Chris Hanson wrote:
> Have any historical sources been published for UNIX on the various 68010 + 68451 systems from the early-mid 1980s?

I have been looking for these for a long time now, in particular the sources for Unisoft Uniplus+ for the 000 or 010
and 451 MMU, or a copy of Motorola's System V port for the VME10. A very long time ago, I disassembled the Unisoft
binary for the Uniplus+ kernel.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
  2020-09-16  8:53 ` Al Kossow
@ 2020-09-16 23:47   ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2020-09-16 23:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Wed, 16 Sep 2020, Al Kossow wrote:

> I have been looking for these for a long time now, in particular the sources 
> for Unisoft Uniplus+ for the 000 or 010 [...]

I still have the mental scars from having to support Uniplus+ ...  Please 
don't ask for further details, because I don't want to recall them when 
having to demonstrate an unstable system at a pre-sales demo.

-- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?
@ 2020-09-16 19:53 Nelson H. F. Beebe
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread
From: Nelson H. F. Beebe @ 2020-09-16 19:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Chris Hanson asks about historical sources for Unix on the Motorola
68K processor.

>From my bibliography at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.bib

I find these Motorola contributions

	The Dynamics of a Semi-Large Software Project with Specific
	Reference to a UNIX System Port
	USENIX Conference Proceedings, Summer, 1984. Salt Lake City, UT
	pp. 332--342
	[I think that I have a printed copy in my campus office, but
	won't be there for another 10 days or so.]

	Latent Source Bugs and UNIX System Portability
	Proceedings: USENIX Association Winter Conference, January
	23--25, 1985, Dallas, Texas, USA
	pp. 125--130

	Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed
	Processing
	Fifth Real-Time Software and Operating Systems Workshop
	Proceedings, May 12--13, 1988. Washington, DC
	pp 47--53

	Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing
	[Fifth RTOS... as above]
	pp. 47--53

	A Faster fsck for BSD UNIX
	Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference: January
	30--February 3, 1989, San Diego, California, USA
	pp. 173--185

Also take a look at the 200 entries in

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/minix.bib

I have made attempts to install Debian 10 on the MC68K on QEMU from an
ISO image at

	https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2020-05-30/

Source code is, of course, available, so it could be useful resource
in porting Minix to the MC68K.

However, while I can get the ISO image to boot, I get grub update
failures and when I try run the installer, I get "No PCI buses
available", For now, I have given up on that platform until new ideas
for workarounds appear.

I have similar emulated VMs for ARM64, RISC-V64, PowerPC (big and
little endian), and IBM System 390x, all of which run nicely, have
up-to-date O/Ses and binary software package repositories, and are
used for routine software build testing.  My attempts for other VMs
for HPPA, Alpha, and SPARC64 CPUs have failed with install or network
problems.  

Debian ISO images are available for IA-64, but QEMU has no support for
the Itanium CPU family.  We have a single phyical IA-64 system that
runs fine, but is currently powered off due to machine-room
air-conditioning issues that will be resolved in a couple of months.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

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-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-09-15 23:28 [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems? Chris Hanson
2020-09-15 23:55 ` Gregg Levine
2020-09-16  3:05   ` Chris Hanson
2020-09-16  5:21 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-09-16  8:53 ` Al Kossow
2020-09-16 23:47   ` Dave Horsfall
2020-09-16 19:53 Nelson H. F. Beebe

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