[TUHS] Musings on PDP-7 Unix

Warren Toomey wkt at tuhs.org
Sun Dec 25 18:39:47 AEST 2016


[ This whole article is just a flight of fancy; feel free to ignore it or
  at least treat it as the whimsy that it is. ]

The PDP-7 Unix system is the first step on the evolution of Unix as we know it.
We have a snapshot of the system around the end of 1970/beginning of 1971 at
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
and a reconstructed and working partial system at
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix

PDP-7 Unix was a playground for Ken, Dennis and others to try out ideas and
implementations, and it was quickly superseded by 1st Edition PDP-11 Unix.
Details of how it evolved are at https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html
and https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

All fine and good. However, I keep wondering, how far could they have taken
Unix on the PDP-7 platform?

The Kernel
----------
The reconstructed kernel only occupies 3070 words of 4096 words available,
so there is room left for more code. There is already an alternative
reconstruction where the "dd" concept has been replaced with the ".."
concept (see https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/tree/master/src/alt).

PDP-7 Unix doesn't have the concept of absolute or relative filenames
(e.g. /usr/bin/ls or a/b/c or ../../file), Could the nami kernel function
be modified to do this? It would probably mean changing from two characters
packed into a word to a single character per word (to make searching for
'/' easier), and this would turn it into something more recognisable as Unix.

What about pipes? They should not be too hard to implement. Even sixteen
pipes with a 16-word buffer each would only be 256+ extra data words in
the kernel. And a hundred words of code?

There are only a few special devices in the kernel: ttyin, ttyout, keyboard,
display, pptin, pptout. What about a disk block device? Was there a PDP-7
tape device, and if so, why not a tape driver and block device?

Filesystem
----------
The implementation of the filesystem is, in some places, quite inefficient.
The free block list is implemented as follows. In each block, there are
10 free block numbers then a pointer to the next part of the free list.
However, each block can hold 64 block numbers, so why are only 10 free
block numbers stored in each block? By using the whole of a block to store
free block numbers, there would actually be more free blocks to use!

Each i-node (size 12 words, 7 of which are direct or indirect pointers)
has one word which holds a unique value. This doesn't seem to be used at
all. If it was reused as a block pointer, this would allow files to be
up to 8*64=512 (small) or 8*64*64=32768 (large) words in length, instead of
7*64=448 words (small) or 7*64*64=28672 (large) words.

The system is set up to only use one side of the two-sided disk device.
It looks like the other side was used to backup (snapshot) a working
system in case of catastrophic filesystem corruption: they could simply
copy the blocks from the "snapshot" side back to the working side. We
could double the size of the filesystem quite easily.

Macro Assembler
---------------
The kernel is written using fairly tight assembly code, and there probably
isn't a way to translate it into a high-level language. The PDP-7 has an
arcane instruction set, and the existing assembler syntax is nothing special.
What about a macro assembler that makes it easier to write code, especially
readable code? Here are some ideas based on the existing kernel:

u.rq := 8	==> lac 8; dac u.rq

function swap	==> swap: 0
{
  return; 	    jmp swap i
}

subroutine .fork ==> fork: line 1	// i.e. not a function
{
  line 1
}

loop		==> 1:
{
}			jmp 1b

if (sad dm1)    ==> 	sad dm1
{			  jmp 1f
  code1			code1
} else {	    1:  code2
  code2
}

  betwen(o101,o132) ==> jms betwen; o101; o132

There are probably a bunch more that could be added. The aim is to
make the control structures easier to read and write. The programmer
still has to grok the PDP-7 instruction set.


B (or other) Language
---------------------
PDP-7 Unix has a B compiler while compiles source down to a virtual
instruction set which is interpreted by the B interpreter. We have the
B interpreter code, and Robert Swierczek managed to rewrite the B compiler,
see https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/other/b.b

At first glance, the PDP-7 architecture is not that amenable to high level
languages, but it turns out that it is indeed possible to write a compiler for
a C subset that targets the PDP-7, see https://github.com/DoctorWkt/a-compiler.
So, could the B compiler be modified to actually output PDP-7 assembly code?
If so, we could rewrite the utilities (cp, mv, ls etc.) in a high-level
language and make the system easier to maintain. I would recommend treating
int and char as the same and only storing one char per word.

And then, even though the PDP-7 architecture doesn't support it, how hard
would it be to add int/char types and bring the language one step closer to C?

Conclusion
----------
All of this is pie in the sky. It can certainly be done, but a) who has
the time and b) it would be a "tour de force", nothing really useful. But
imagine if, at the beginning of 1970, Unix had a proper B or C compiler,
utilities written in this high-level language, a kernel written in a semi-high
level language, and a system with pipes and proper pathnames.

Cheers, Warren



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