[TUHS] BSD/OS

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 31 August 2024 at  0:12:16 -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> From: Kevin Bowling
>
>> https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to suggest
>> it originated off Net/2 directly.
>
> I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the
> *BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten
> details wrong

FWIW, my understanding is also that it came from Net/2.  But it's been
a few years now, and I wasn't directly involved.  I just can't think
of anything else from which it could have been derived.

> (So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from
> 'BSD/386'. Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'?)

Not to my knowledge.

> Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in,
> you lived through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any
> errors therein.

I wouldn't exactly call it early history, but my first exposure to
(any kind of) BSD was in March 1992, when I installed BSDI's BSD/386
(something like Beta 0.3.1).  You can read more than you want at
http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-mar1992.php

I subsequently (August 1992) visited Rob Kolstad, who was running the
show at the time, and he filled me in.  With his help, what I recall
is:

- Some time in or before 1991, a company called Berkeley Software
  Design Inc (BSDI) was formed with the intention of completing and
  marketing a BSD variant.  The system was released as BSD/386 in
  1992.

- BSDI had a number of prominent BSD people, including Bill Jolitz.
  Bill was not in agreement that they should charge money for it, and
  as Rob tells me, in December 1991 Bill left the company after
  significant altercations, destroying all his work.  He later
  released his version, 386BSD.

- At some later date BSDI released a SPARC port, at which point the
  name BSD/386 seemed inappropriate, so they changed it to BSD/OS.  I
  have a CD set of release 2.0 labeled BSD/OS.

- The last CD set I have is undated, version 3.0, labeled BSDI
  Internet Server.  I think it was still called BSD/OS, but I can't be
  sure.

  Round this time I moved away from BSD/OS, since it cost money, and
  FreeBSD seemed to be just as good.

- In June 2000 we (FreeBSD) discussed merging the code bases of BSD/OS
  and FreeBSD, specifically for SMP improvements.  At the time the
  BSD/OS release was 4.x, and we were looking at the 5.0 code.  This
  is also the first time where I saw the name written as BSDi;
  previously, including all the CDs, it was always BSDI.

On Friday, 30 August 2024 at 21:40:29 -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>
> BSD/386 seems to be a first order derivative of net/2.  Source:
> https://ia902809.us.archive.org/25/items/BSD3861.1CD/bsd1.1-manual.pdf.
> To what degree that it incorporated anything from 386bsd would
> probably rely on first hand accounts.

As mentioned above, not at all.  When the first flaky 386BSD betas
were released, BSD/386 was already up and running.

> I don't have much to go on for BSD/OS 2.x but it seems like it was
> about rebasing on 4.4-lite if we look at the family tree
> http://www.netbsd.org/about/history.html

Yes, this would have been one of the results of the AT&T lawsuit.
FreeBSD 2.0 was also rebased on 4.4BSD-Lite.

> Luckily for BSD/OS 4.x we get some release notes:
> *
> https://ia600908.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22/items/bsdos-4.01/bsdos-4.01-binary.iso&file=RELEASENOTES.pdf

Yes, that looks good.  It also narrows the time frame for when BSDI
became BSDi, some time between July 1998 and June 2000.

> For 5.x I again don't have much to go on but we can take an indirect
> approach from some FreeBSD SMPng reports where BSDi donated source
> code that was not used wholesale but instead had to be reintegrated or
> rewritten:
> * http://www.lemis.com/grog/Daemons-advocate/unix-way-c.html

Heh.  I had forgotten about that.

> I would be pretty confident in saying BSD/OS is _not_ a FreeBSD
> derivative but a first order derivative of net/2

Yes, I think so.  I can't think of anything else that could have been
in between.

> ... that eventually wound up looking a little bit like FreeBSD in
> its later years.

Hmm.  You haven't discussed how FreeBSD evolved, which was from
386BSD.  And my understanding is that 386BSD, like BSD/386, was also
derived from Net/2.  I used both BSD/OS and FreeBSD side by side for a
number of years without noticing significant differences.  It wasn't
until I started porting the SMP code from BSD/OS 5.0 to FreBSD
(coincidentally also 5.0) that I realized how different the kernel had
become.

> According to grog in
> (www.lemis.com/grog/Daemons-advocate/unix-way-c.html) there was an
> attempt by BSDi to rebase to FreeBSD but it was abandoned.

My recollection was that the intention was to merge rather than
rebase.  What we did do (the SMP code) was definitely from BSD/OS to
FreeBSD.  The rest of the merge idea didn't get very far, and I can't
recall any significant attempts to push it forward.

> I've found scant detail on what WindRiver did with 5.0 and 5.1 so I
> am unsure, but in playing around with 5.1 it does have FreeBSD's CAM
> layer but does not look like i.e. FreeBSD 5.x in a variety of
> material ways.

It's worth considering what things were like at the time.   You, as
potential user, have the choice: BSD/OS for $1000 or FreeBSD for free.
What advantage do you get from BSD/OS?  Yes, there were some, but they
weren't really enough to keep BSD/OS viable.  That's why I had made
the change a few years earlier, and I don't think that WindRiver's
heart was really in it.  So the SMP code was really something like a
swan song.

Greg
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