[TUHS] 2.11BSD cross compiling update

So I got a fair bit further advanced on my 2.11BSD cross compiler project, at the moment it can make a respectable unix tree (/bin /usr etc) with a unix kernel and most software in it. I unpacked the resulting tarball and chrooted into it on a running SIMH system and it worked OK, was a bit rough around the edges (missing a few necessary files in /usr/share and that kind of thing) but did not crash. I haven't tested the kernel recently but last time I tested it, it booted, and the checksys output is OK. I then ended up doing a fair bit of re-engineering, how this came about was that I had to port the timezone compiler (zic) to run on the Linux cross compilation host, since the goal is eventually to build a SIMH-bootable disk (filesystem) with everything on it. This was a bit involved, it crashed initially and it turned out it was doing localtime() on really small and large values to try to figure out the range of years the system could handle. On the Linux system this returns NULL for unreasonable time_t values which POSIX allows it to do. Hence the crash. It wasn't too obvious how to port this code. (But whatever I did, it had to produce the exact same timezone files as a native build). So what I ended up doing was to port a tiny subset of 2.11BSD libc to Linux, including its types. I copied the ctime.c module and prefixed everything with "cross_" so there was "cross_time_t" and so forth, and "#include <time.h>" became "#include <cross/time.h>", in turn this depends on "#include <cross/sys/types.h>" and so on. That way, the original logic worked unchanged. I decided to also redo the cross compilation tools (as, cc, ld, nm, ranlib and so on) using the same approach, since it was conceptually elegant. This involved making e.g. "cross_off_t" and "struct cross_exec" available by "#include <cross/a.out.h>", and obviously the scheme extends to whatever libc functions we want to use. In particular we use floating point, and I plan to make a "cross_atof()" for the C compiler's PDP-11-formatted floating-point constant handling, etc. (This side of things, like the cross tools, was working, but was not terribly elegant before). So then I got to thinking, actually this is an incredibly powerful approach. Instead of just going at it piecemeal, would it not be easier just to port the entire thing across? To give an example what I mean, the linker contains code like this: if (nund==0) printf("Undefined:\n"); nund++; printf("%.*s\n", NNAMESIZE, sp->n_name); It is printing n_name from a fixed-size char array, so to save the cost of doing a strncpy they have used that "%.*s" syntax which tells printf not to go past the end of the char array. But this isn't supported in Linux. I keep noticing little problems like this (actually I switched off "-Wformat" which was possibly a bad idea). So with my latest plan this will actually run the 2.11BSD printf() instead of the Linux printf(), and the 2.11BSD stdio (fixing various other breakage that occured because BUFSIZ isn't 512 on the Linux system), and so on. What I will do is, provide a low level syscalls module like cross_open(), cross_read(), cross_write() and so on, which just redirect the request into the normal Linux system calls, while adjusting for the fact that size_t is 16 bits and so forth. This will be really great. In case it sounds like this is over-engineering, well bear in mind that one knotty problem I hadn't yet tackled is the standalone utilities, for instance the 2.11BSD tape distribution contains a standalone "restor" program which is essentially a subset of the kernel, including its device drivers, packaged with the normal "restor" utility into one executable that can be loaded off the tape. It was quite important to me that I get this ported over to Linux, so that I can produce filesystems, etc, at the Linux level, all ready to boot when I attach them to SIMH. But it was going to be hugely challenging, since compiling any program that includes more than the most basic kernel headers would have caused loads of conflicts with Linux's kernel headers and system calls. So the new approach completely fixes all that. I did some experiments the last few days with a program that I created called "xify". What it does is to read a C file, and to every identifier it finds, including macro names, C-level identifiers, include file names, etc, it prepends the sequence "x_". The logic is a bit convoluted since it has to leave keywords alone and it has to translate types so that "unsigned int" becomes "x_unsigned_int" which I can define with a typedef, and so on. Ancient C constructs like "register i;" were rather problematic, but I have got a satisfactory prototype system now. I also decided to focus on 4.3BSD rather than 2.11BSD, since by this stage I know the internals and the build system extremely intimately, and I'm aware of quite a lot of inconsistencies which will be a lot of work to tidy up, basically things that had been hurriedly ported from 4.3BSD while trying not to change the corresponding 2.8~2.10BSD code too much. Also in the build system there are quite a few different ways of implementing "make depend" for example, and this annoys me, I did have some ambitious projects to tidy it all up but it's too difficult. So a fresh start is good, and I am satisfied with the 2.11BSD project up to this moment. So what will happen next is basically once I have "-lx_c" (the "cross" version of the 4.3BSD C library) including the "xified" versions of the kernel headers, then I will try to get the 4.3BSD kernel running on top of Linux, it will be a bit like User-Mode Linux. It will use simulated network devices like libpcap, or basically just whatever SIMH uses, since I can easily drop in the relevant SIMH code and then connect it up using the 4.3BSD kernel's devtab. The standalone utilities like "restor" should then "just work". The cross toolchain should also "just work" apart from the floating point issue, since it was previously targeting the VAX which is little-endian, and the wordsize issues and the library issues are taken care of by "xifying". Very nice. The "xifying" stuff is in a new repository 43bsd.git at my bitbucket (user nick_d2). cheers, Nick