[TUHS] Code bloat

Nick Downing downing.nick at gmail.com
Wed Feb 8 22:57:13 AEST 2017


Yes, thanks Jacob, I realized after posting that I had oversimplified
things since definitely 386BSD was based on NET/2 as you say. Anyway,
it's a very good thing that all is now unencumbered, I remember
working on 2.11BSD 6~8yrs back and always having a strong concern in
the back of my mind that it would be enormously complicated to sort
out the licensing should I ever have an actual release.

Warren, I hadn't realized that DoctorWkt = Dr Warren K. Toomey haha.
Yes well actually I was aware of Xinu although I didn't realize there
was an already-done Apple II port or that you had created it. I will
certainly load it up. However the idea in my mind is to have the OS
written in C, since I have some ideas for a simple but globally
optimizing compiler which I hope makes 6502 a bit more C-friendly.

I hadn't heard of xv6 but I will look into it. However, for me,
compatibility is a huge concern, and there are so many little corner
cases -- what happens if XXX signal arrives during YYY, does it
ERESTART or EINTR... what happens if a directory is setgid and sticky
and XXX operation is performed... I guess for V7 these kinds of
questions are not too vexing, but when you get to BSD with process
groups and job control and EUIDS and so on... it's just too hard to
try to recreate it and have it still be compatible in all these tiny
details. If I was happy with that, I would have persevered with UZI
(Unix Z-80 Implementation), but I kept finding little bugs and/or
differences.

As to Contiki, yes it's quite an amazing piece of software, I picked
it up when I first got into 2.11BSD (maybe 6~8 yrs ago) which is also
when I started to realize UZI would be too much work to make
acceptably Unix-like. I briefly got excited about Contiki. The reason
I did not persevere with Contiki, was to do with its proto-threads
concept. It's basically event-driven, a task proceeds through the
system by receiving callbacks in which it does a bit of processing and
then goes to sleep by registering for some other callback at a later
time.

But, there's a compatibility issue, since you have to rewrite all your
software. Ordinary code like say, an ftp client with a main() function
that calls socket() and read() and write(), doesn't work under this
model, and can't be made to work without a complete rewrite. More
seriously though, it's a pretty unfriendly way to write code, at least
without significant compiler support. I know this because as a
teenager I used to do work for local SysOps running TheMajorBBS, which
was also stackless in order to serve hundreds of incoming modem
connections on 286 or (later on) 386 hardware. Every MajorBBS app or
menu was written like a state machine and it got really tedious after
a while. Thinking about it, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could
certainly have chosen this model for implementing the Unix syscalls,
to save on the space required for the kernel stack, however they did
not, and as a result the system is vastly simplified.

However, given the TCP/IP stack is nearly always implemented as a
state machine, the Contiki TCP/IP stack could be useful to my project.
Thanks a lot for the alert. I am not even sure if it had TCP/IP at all
when I last looked at it, although it definitely had windowing.

cheers, Nick

On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 11:29 PM, Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On 2017-02-08 12:21, Nick Downing wrote:
>>
>> Yes, NetBSD and 386BSD are interesting. They could well form a good
>> basis for a minimal but fully functional OS for a modern platform. One
>> reservation I have though, is as follows: When 386BSD and its
>> derivatives like OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD came out, Unix was still
>> encumbered and thus they had to be based on 4.4BSD Lite (not even
>> NET/2 was safe). Nobody made an unencumbered version of say 4.3BSD or
>> even NET/2, even though it was theoretically possible, by examining
>> what had to be taken out/added to produce 4.4BSD Lite.
>
>
> The 386BSD porting started on 4.3BSD-Reno with patches being fed back
> to BSD. Stuff was being thrown out of BSD at the same time for the Net
> releases. Must have been difficult. First release was Net/2 + missing
> bits and pieces. ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/4.3bsd/i386-jolitz/diffs/
> Note that Jolitz was never sued for using Net/2 ;)
>
> NetBSD and FreeBSD started as 386bsd 0.1 + patchkits. To "unencumber"
> NetBSD the 0.8 release was scrubbed from the net and a pile of files
> in cvs were replaced with the text "revision x.y intentionally removed"
> and rewritten or taken from a cleaner BSD release.
> List of files at http://oldbsd.org/removed.txt
>
> FreeBSD claiming to be 4.4BSD-Lite based is, I think, a legal fiction.
> I could be wrong, but it is far more likely they did it the same way
> as NetBSD after the FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 release. I don't believe they
> restarted with a clean 4.4BSD-Lite tape, but the FreeBSD handbook
> claims that is what they did for the 2.0 release.



More information about the TUHS mailing list