[COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

[Adam Thornton]

This has inspired me to re-read Melinda Varian's "What Mother Never Told
You About VM Service" and it's still a magnificent document.  I once again
find the control files confusing as hell, but once you get used to how they
work, which once upon a time I was, you had a repeatable (and unwindable!)
service process.

I miss the casualness with which you'd build a new CP nucleus and test it
out on a second-level system.  It's so much better than anything in the
Unix world, far more elegant than testing kernel patches in a Linux virtual
machine, largely because of the ease with which you can attach minidisks to
a first, second, or whatever-level system.  I guess cgroups and bind mounts
finally get you most of the way there in terms of mounting arbitrary
storage to virtual systems, but it's still a pain in the ass to test
multiple kernels.

Not that I spend much time anymore that far down in the system (any
system!), but...VM got a lot of things right.

Adam

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 7:15 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
> >> Program Temporary Fix.
> >
> > Yes.  But I recall correctly.  See the Wikipedia page:
> >
> >  Customers sometimes explain the acronym in a tongue-in-cheek manner as
> >  permanent temporary fix or more practically probably this fixes,
> >  because they have the option to make the PTF a permanent part of the
> >  operating system if the patch fixes the problem.
>
> Yeah, they did have a habit of being permanent, but I don't recall
> them ever being called by any of those names during my servitude.
>
> -- Dave
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20201112/b57a2bd0/attachment.htm>