[TUHS] Fwd: Code bloat (was: How Unix brings people together, or it's a small...)

[Brantley Coile]

Regarding putting TCP/IP Into V7, I found it not that hard. First, it's not that hard to implement Dennis' streams in V7, and then, using the streams structure, do a straight forward TCP right from the pseudocode from the appendix of the RFC. I still have it around somewhere. 

If you're interested I can share it with you. 

  Brantley 

Sent from my iPad

On Feb 8, 2017, at 11:14 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>> From: Nick Downing
> 
>> I'm much more of a V7 guy and I think I would find V6 strange and
>> compromised
> 
> De gustibus. I used it for many years, and am quite at home in it. I think
> it's a marvel of functionality/size - at the time it came out, not much bigger
> than DEC PDP-11 OS's, but with a 'big system' feel to it (which they
> _definitely_ did not) - in fact, _better_ than most big systems of the day.
> 
> But I can see it would be rather too simple (and in the kernel inelegant,
> code-wise, by today's standards - see below) for many. V7 is not that
> different, in terms of user experience, from V6, though.
> 
> 
>> I am thinking I will definitely have to apply some of these patches, or
>> at least check how much they increase the code size by.
> 
> Sorry, that page is kind of a mish-mosh. Most of the stuff that's talked about
> there is for user commands, not the kernel.
> 
> There are only a few kernel changes (lseek() and mdate(), and param.c so that
> the new 'si' command can get thing from param.h without having to have it
> compiled in), and they are all small.
> 
> 
>> But probably my preferred approach is to calculate a patch V6 -> Mini
>> Unix or V6 -> LSX and then try to apply that on top of V7.
> 
> I'm a little confused as to what your goal is here. Get V6 running on some
> other architecture? Upgrade V6 for some goal which I am not aware of? I know
> you probably said something in an earlier email, sorry, I don't recall.
> 
> Anyway, if you're going to do anything with V6 kernel code, you need to be
> aware that it's really idiosyncratic - a lot of its written in a very early
> dialect of C, and while things like 'a =+ b' -> 'a += b' and 'int a 1' -> 'int
> a = 1' are pretty easy to fix, there are lots of intances of int's being used
> as pointers to several different kinds of structures, etc, etc.
> 
> If you want to move an early, small Unix to something other than a PDP-11, V7
> is probably a much better bet.
> 
> 
>> As to moving to a V7 kernel and then adding TCP/IP I'm not sure if this
>> is adviseable, as I was saying earlier I think it might be best to keep
>> that functionality outboard from the kernel.
> 
> There are a couple of early TCP/IP's which ran outside the kernel, but I think
> the standard Berkeley one might be a handful to move out.  
> 
>    Noel