[TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?

[Pat Barron]

On 3/17/2016 8:48 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
> As a side note, the PDP-7 kernel knows about the top-level directory ("dd")
> but it is agnostic to the concept of "." and "..". What that means is
> that you can build a filesystem with "." and ".." links and the kernel
> will deal with them as per all other links. But you can also build a
> filesystem without "." or ".." and the kernel doesn't care.
>
> There's not enough evidence (source code, papers, anecdotes) to confirm
> or deny the presence of "." in the PDP-7 code that Norman scanned for us.
> ".." does seem to exist as it is mentioned in one source file, ds.s.
> It's an intruiging mystery.

So, I'm trying to figure out - at what point did "." and ".." really 
become part of the filesystem?  Even as late as V7, "." and ".." were 
not automatically added to directories when created - the "mkdir" 
program used mknod() to create the directory, and then created the links 
for "." and ".." by itself.  I see code in the kernel that has special 
handling of "." in unlink(), and also some in "namei()" - but I don't 
see anywhere where ".." is obviously handled at all.  Though I figure it 
has to be, somehow, because when mkdir makes the directory and creates 
the links for "." and "..", it doesn't have to figure out the inode 
number or anything - that part just seems to happen behind the scenes.  
I just can't figure out where or how....

The first place I saw where mkdir() became a system call, and the system 
call handled "." and ".." by itself, was in 4.1BSD....

--Pat.