[TUHS] v6tar from v7 on v6, too large?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Dec 9 15:17:20 AEST 2015


    > From: Noel Chiappa

    > the most likely is that 'v6tar' is linked to be split I+D, and your V6
    > emulation is on a machine that doesn't have split I+D (e.g. an 11/40)

Now that I think about it, the linked systems that are part of the V6 distro
tape are all linked to run on an 11/40. They will boot and run OK on a more
powerful machine (/45 or /70), but they will act like they are on a /40 -
i.e. no split I+D support/use (user or kernel). So to get split I+D support,
you need to build a new Unix binary, with m45.s instead of m40.s. If you
haven't done that, that's probably what the problem is.


Aside: V6 comes in two flavours: no split I+D at all, or split I+D in both
the kernel and user. For some reason that I can't recall, we actually
produced an 'm43.s', BITD at MIT, which ran the kernel in non-split-I-D, but
supported split I-D for the users.

I wish I could remember why we did this - it couldn't have been to save
memory (the machine didn't have a great deal on it when this was done -
although I have this vague memory that that was why we did it), because
running split I+D in the kernel does not, I think, use any more physical
memory (provided you don't fiddle with the parameters like the number of
buffers) than running non-split. Or maybe it does?

One possible reason was that the odd layout of memory with split I+D in the
kernel made debugging kernel code harder (we were doing a lot of kernel
hacking to support early networking work); another was that we were just being
conservative, didn't need to extra space in the kernel that I+D allowed, and
so didn't want to run it.

	Noel



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