[TUHS] NetBSD VMs from 1.0 to present

[Chris Pinnock]

Evening all,

Seeing as our leader is worried about aliveness, I felt it fitting to send a link to a part-time project I’m working on.

A couple of weeks ago, I fired up Virtualbox and installed NetBSD/i386 1.0 from floppy images. Virtualbox can be persuaded to read 1.2MB floppies - I’ve had less luck on Qemu with this. But after I setup the VM, I quickly converted it to one that Qemu could use.

Then I loaded all the source floppies for 1.1 and 1.2 onto the VM, then upgraded the VM to 1.1 then 1.2 by compiling from source. By which time the pcnet network interface worked reliably. NetBSD still provides a pserver CVS method, so I was able then to CVS update, upgrade to 1.3.3 onwards.

1.4.3 -> 1.5.4 involves a change of binary format from a.out -> ELF. 

From 1.6 onwards, life becaomes simpler because of the build.sh system, but I spent the time to go all the way up to 9.2 via sources between each release. (I managed to build 9.2 from 6.1 as well.)

The VMs can be found on this landing page:
https://chrispinnock.com/stuff/netbsd/

I’m working on a write-up which I will publish at some point and I’m also working on OpenBSD branching off at NetBSD 1.1 - I’ve build a OpenBSD 2.0 VM from the NetBSD 1.1 VM on the page above.

amnesiac# ls -l /ne*                                        
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  19089180 Mar 26 02:47 /netbsd    
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    659600 Mar 13 22:09 /netbsd.10
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   1332275 Mar 13 22:09 /netbsd.11
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   1477949 Mar 13 16:13 /netbsd.12
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   1530049 Mar 13 17:47 /netbsd.121
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   2211878 Mar 14 02:23 /netbsd.133
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   3407541 Mar 14 05:12 /netbsd.143
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   4941157 Mar 14 05:50 /netbsd.154.aout
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   5048054 Mar 14 09:20 /netbsd.154.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   6182687 Mar 14 11:53 /netbsd.162
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   7447216 Mar 14 14:35 /netbsd.203
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   7476202 Mar 15 01:12 /netbsd.21
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   8577892 Mar 15 11:50 /netbsd.31
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  10343742 Mar 15 23:47 /netbsd.4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  12002769 Mar 16 05:31 /netbsd.52         
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  13116694 Mar 16 14:53 /netbsd.61
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  17143555 Mar 17 04:50 /netbsd.72
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  19695304 Mar 20 09:12 /netbsd.82   
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  19089180 Mar 28 10:46 /netbsd.92

All the best
Chris