[TUHS] Redoing "V6on286" or porting V7...?

[Peter Jeremy]

I've also looked at this in the past.  I lost interest when my
intended target box died (and I realised I didn't have the free time).

On 2005-Nov-12 08:18:50 -0500, Brantley Coile <brantley at coraid.com> wrote:
>i may be wrong, but i don't think you want the segments.  pdp-11
>segments divided the address space into eight, well, segments.  each
>could be grow up or grow down and had a physical base and a limit.
>intel segments don't work that way.  the major difference is that the
>segment selector, instead of being the upper most three bits of the
>virtual address, is not even in the address space at all.

Actually the 286 MMU is very primitive compared to the PDP-11.  One
crucial difference is that Unix has the implicit assumption that the
stack is in the data space - which is not true on the 286.  This
difference is fairly critical to Unix and makes it impossible to
accurately reproduce the traditional Unix memory protection.

>so the eight, for a pdp-11/40 say, or the sixteen for the 11/70 don't
>really apply.  instead just give each data segment the whole 64k
>address space and it'll not klobber anybody else.  just itself.

This is fairly wasteful of RAM.  Keep in mind that V6 cannot page -
a process is either entirely in memory or entirely on disk.  If you
limit yourself to 640K RAM, you are probably restricting yourself
to about 6 resident processes.  And swapping means moving 64K of
data to/from disk.

This approach also makes brk(2) a no-op.  There's nothing to prevent a
process using as much heap as it wants (or crashing into the stack).
(No SIGSEGV or SIGBUS errors).

>you're correct to imply that v6 takes up MUCH less space than other
>systems.  it's amazing how small you can run this.  the root in the
>6th edition system is only 1.4MB.  and that includes the normal
>binaries, libraries and the source to the kernel.  it'll run great on
>a floopy.

You will need to have a swap partition.  And if each process has a
64K data segment, you'll need a comparatively large amount of swap.
The biggest disadvantage of a floppy will be performance - latency
of about 80msec, I/O of about 40KB/sec.

Have you identified a suitable C compiler?  There aren't many open
source 16-bit x86 compilers, especially ones that can run in 16-bit
mode.  None of the ones I found generated particularly good code.
This may impact you ability to get the larger utilities (and maybe
the kernel) to fit into 64K I-space.

-- 
Peter Jeremy

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