[TUHS] Code bloat

Jacob Goense dugo at xs4all.nl
Thu Feb 9 00:10:24 AEST 2017


On 2017-02-08 14:10, jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com wrote:
> After I had pasted a bunch of 386BSD pl0.24 + a CVS export of 0.8 I
> did get a booting system.

I remember that Victor Frankenstein ;) Proved how close these 2 were.

> Then I found an old ftp site that had 0.8
> I made a mirror of it, then it disappeared.

Very glad that piece of history got unearthed.

> I did some minor work on installing it on Bochs years ago, and VMware,
> from what I recall, NetBSD 1.0/1.1 can boot 386BSD’s kernel, while
> the 386BSD boot diskette didn’t work under emulation, NetBSD’s
> does, and I used that to kickstart an installation.  Same with the
> boot blocks on the harddisk image.

386BSD is now bootable in Bochs, with very, very specific settings.
One that works at:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dugoh/tobochs/master/bochsrc

Back then it required a patch against bochs too as the boot blocks
do some truly weird stuff with the PIC (polling OCW3?), something
most emulators don't implement or even barf on.

These 2 little marvels didn't have much bloat, but the Bostification
had already set in. My idea of a true diet x86 UNIX system would be
a report of Tahoe without resorting to gcc/gas or anything else that
smells like RMS.



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