[TUHS] Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers

[Jonathan Gray]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 09:02:38PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> 
> 
> > On 31 Dec 2022, at 15:59, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 1:26 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:
> >> [snip]
> >> It would seem that the next step for Unix in the area of boot, config and device drivers came with Sun’s OpenBoot in 1988 or so. This also appears to be the first appearance of device trees to describe the hardware to the bios and the kernel. Moreover, it would seem to me that OpenBoot is a spiritual ancestor of the modern Risc-V SBI specification. Maybe by 1988 the IO hardware had become sufficiently complex and/or diverse to warrant a break from tradition?
> >> 
> >> Was there any other notable Unix work on better organising the boot process and the device drivers prior to OpenBoot?
> > 
> > I think that BSD supported autoconfiguration on the VAX well before
> > OpenBoot; the OpenBSD man page says it dates from 4.1 (1981) and was
> > revamped in 4.4.
> 
> That is interesting. Are you referring to this:
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.1cBSD/a/sys/conf
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.1cBSD/usr/man/man8/config.8

"the tuned-up system, with the addition of Robert Elz's auto
configuration code, was released as 4.1BSD in June, 1981"

McKusick, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

"This update to the fourth distribution of November 1980 provides
support for the VAX 11/750 and for the full interconnect architecture of
the VAX 11/780.  Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne
contributed greatly to this distribution especially in the boot-time
system configuration code"

http://bitsavers.org/bits/UCB_CSRG/4.1_BSD_19810710.zip

4.4 discussed in Torek's
Device Configuration in 4.4BSD
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/kernel/config-torek.ps
https://www.netbsd.org/~mrg/config-torek-fixed.pdf

which references:

A New Framework for Device Support in Berkeley Unix
from Proceedings of the UKUUG, London, Summer 1990.

not online, though Chris sent Warner a copy in 2021
https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2021-April/023756.html
I would also like to read it.  Perhaps it could be added to the archive?