[TUHS] Some notes on running UNIX v6 in 2015, using SimH and a healthy dose of documentation
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Dec 4 01:42:00 AEST 2015
> From: Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com>
> a deeper read will require the reader to have knowledge beyond what is
> required of most modern software developers (PDP-11 architecture,
> assembly language, and UNIX are prerequisite).
Well, for pretty much any _operating system_ (as opposed to applications),
one will need to know something about the details of the machine it is
intended to run on; depending on which part of the OS one is looking at, it
will be more or less. E.g. switching processes probably requires a fair
amount, since one needs to know about internal CPU registers, etc; whereas
working on the file system, one probably doesn't need to know very much about
the machine.
> It will also require access to a lab where the ideas covered can be
> experimented with.
Actually, Lions/V6 was used in operating systems courses using simulated
machines; one at MIT, 6.828 "Operating Systems Engineering":
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/
used it for a while before the students started complaining about being
forced to learn an obsolete machine. They thereupon wrote a V6 clone for the
x86 architecture, 'XV6' (see the top of that page), which is apparently now
used for similar courses at quite a few other universities.
> The v6 kernel ... packs in features that were either unavailable in
> larger more established systems or may have been present in some form,
> but were orders of magnitude more lines of code and attendant
> complexity. It was and remains an amazing operating system and worthy
> of contemporary study.
I don't think you will find too many people here who disagree! ;-)
> So, I was thinking that next up, I would write up notes to help the
> modern reader engage with v6 more easily in order to follow works like
> Lyons.
Check around online to see what exists, first; there has been stuff written
since Lions! ;-)
Noel
More information about the TUHS
mailing list