[TUHS] Re: Porting Unix v6 to i386
Warren Toomey
wkt at minnie.tuhs.org
Mon Feb 4 20:57:28 AEST 2002
In article by P.A.Osborne:
> [V6 is well described in the Lions Commentary]
> My thoughts exactly funnily enough.
Well, seeing as though Paul referred to me (see below), I'll throw my
own $0.02 in. I'd recommend V7 for several reasons:
- it's more portable
- the flavour of C used is more modern
- it's got more useful applications (yacc etc.)
- you get the stdio library
- one last thing, there were some awful race conditions and
bogosities in V6 that just had to be fixed. See the
`50 bugs' tape, and also Dennis' own admission about
6th Edition savu/retu at
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html
> Pondering just this over the weekend has left me wondering whether
> MiniUnix would be a better initial place to start - as its essentially
> V6, but without memory management or pipes. Which as a starting point
> for the experiment may be an easier place to start.
You could port that in a short amount of time, and treat it as a
warming-up exercise!
> Also as a sideline, I don't know how the list owner of this list
> feels about this discussion potentially swamping the list.
I think the list needs some traffic :-) It might be worth setting up
a list for the e-mails between co-developers, but also to have periodic
status reports and questions sent to this list.
> That way those of
> us who are regarded as sad, mad or just plain losers can take our
> mutterings somewhere else.
Why do you think I set this list up in the first place ;-) ??!
Cheers,
Warren
More information about the TUHS
mailing list