Usenet 1994 October/usenetsourcesnewsgroupsinfomagicoctober1994disk2.iso/unix/volume11/bsd2.10.note

Text File | 1987-09-22 | 9KB | 200 lines

Subject:  v11INF4:  BSD2.10 available from Usenix
Newsgroups: comp.sources.unix
Sender: sources
Approved: [e-mail]

Submitted-by: [e-mail] (Keith Bostic)
Posting-number: Volume 11, Info 4
Archive-name: bsd2.10.note

[  There's precedent for announcing major distributions here.  --r$  ]

      Second Distribution of Berkeley PDP-11 Software for UNIX
                             Release 2.10
                         (Revised April 1987)

     The USENIX association and the Computer  Systems  Research  Group
(CSRG)  of  the  University  of  California,  Berkeley, are pleased to
announce the distribution of a new release  of  the  "Second  Berkeley
Software Distribution" (2.10BSD).

     This release will be handled by the USENIX  association,  and  is
available  to all V7, System III, System V, and 2.9BSD licensees.  The
Association will continue to maintain the non-profit price of $200, as
was  charged  by  the CSRG.  The release will consist of two 2400 ft.,
1600 bpi tapes (approximately 80M)  and  approximately  100  pages  of
documentation.   If  you  require 800 bpi tapes, please contact USENIX
for more information.

     If you have questions about  the  distribution  of  the  release,
please  contact  USENIX.  USENIX's address and phone number is as fol-
lows:

     USENIX Association
     P.O. Box 2299
     Berkeley, CA  94710
     [phone]

USENIX may also be contacted by electronic mail at:
     {ucbvax,decvax}!usenix!office

If you have technical questions  about  the  release,  please  contact
Keith Bostic at:
     {ucbvax,seismo}!keith
     [e-mail]
     [phone]

Q: What machines will 2.10BSD run on?

     2.10BSD will run on:
          11/24/34/44/53/60/70/73/83/84
          11/23/35/40/45/50/55 with 18 or 22 bit addressing

     2.10 WILL NOT run on:
          T11, 11/03/04/05/10/15/20/21
          11/23/35/40/45/50/55 with 16 bit addressing

Q: What's new in this release?

          Lots of stuff.  This release is 4.3BSD.  We don't expect  to
     distribute manuals this time, we expect people to simply use  the
     4.3BSD  ones.  A list of some of the larger things that have been
     added:

          22-bit Qbus support
          4.3BSD networking, (TCP/IP, SLIP)
          4.3BSD serial line drivers
          4.3BSD C library
          most of the 4.3BSD application programs
          complete set of 4.3BSD system calls
          MSCP device driver for (RQDX? UDA50, KLESI)
          RAM disk
          inode, core, and swap caching
          conversion of the entire system to a 4.3BSD structure

Q: Why get this release?

          You want to get this release for one of two reasons.  Either
     you have a number of 4.3BSD programs or machines in your environ-
     ment and you'd like consistency across the  environment,  or  you
     want  a  faster,  cleaner version of 2.9BSD, with or without net-
     working.

          This release is, without question, considerably faster  than
     any other PDP-11 system out there.  There have been several major
     changes to the 2.10BSD kernel to speed it up.

          +    The kernel namei routine has been modified to read  the
               entire  path  name  in  at once rather than as a single
               character at a time, as well as maintaining a cache  of
               its position in the current directory.

          +    The exec routine now copies its arguments a string at a
               time, rather than a character at a time.

          +    All inodes are placed  in  an  LRU  cache,  eliminating
               going to disk for often used inodes; kernel inodes also
               contain more of the disk inode information to eliminate
               require disk access for stat(2) calls.

          +    Both core and swap are LRU cached; the former  is  par-
               ticularly  interesting  on  PDP-11's with large amounts
               (for PDP's, anyway) of memory.  Our experience with  an
               11/44  with  4M of memory, in a student environment, is
               that it never swaps, and only rarely do programs  leave
               core.

               This change is largely responsible for My Favorite Tim-
               ing:  Ultrix 11, V3.0, on my 11/73, with a single RD52,
               takes 1.1 system  seconds  to  run  vi.   2.9BSD  takes
               approximately  .9 system seconds, a difference probably
               attributable to the fact that 2.9BSD has  vfork.   Once
               2.10BSD has the vi image in its core cache, it executes
               vi in .2 system seconds.

          +    Finally, many other speedups, such as rewriting several
               of  C library routines in assembler, replacing the ker-
               nel clist routines with the faster 4.3BSD ones, caching
               and  hashing  process  id's,  and splitting the process
               list into multiple lists have been added.

Q: How good is the networking?

          The networking is 4.3BSD's.  It runs, it runs correctly.  It
     eats  space like there's some kind of reward.  We are considering
     fixing the latter by moving the networking into supervisor space.

Q: Will this release be supported?

          This release is not supported, nor should it  be  considered
     an  official  Berkeley  release.   It  was called 2.10BSD because
     2.9BSD has clearly become overworked and  System  V  was  already
     taken.

          The ``bugs'' address supplied with this release (as well  as
     with  the  4BSD  releases)  will  work for some unknown period of
     time; make sure that the ``Index:'' line of the bug report  indi-
     cates  that  the release is ``2BSD''.  See the sendbug(8) program
     for more details.  All fixes that we make, or that  are  sent  to
     us,   will   be   posted   on   USENET,   in   the   news   group
     ``comp.bugs.2bsd''.  USENIX is aware of this problem and is  wil-
     ling  to make hard-copy bug reports available to those of you not
     connected to the net.

          To summarize, all that I can say is that any major  problems
     will  be  fixed, i.e. if you've got a program that's crashing the
     kernel, we'll be inclined to fix it.  If ``ls'' is  misformatting
     its output, you're probably on your own.

Q: Is this the last release?

          Yes, at least by us; quite frankly,  we'd  rather  sacrifice
     our chance at heaven than look at a 16-bit machine again.

Q: Who did all this wonderful, exciting, neat stuff?

          Mostly Casey Leedom, of California State  University,  Stan-
     islaus, and Keith Bostic, of the CSRG.  From the ``Changes to the
     Kernel in 2.10BSD'' paper:

               The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of
          many other people to the work described here.  Major contri-
          butors include Gregory Travis of the  Institute  for  Social
          Research, and Steven Uitti of Purdue University.  Jeff John-
          son, also of the Institute for Social Research, was  largely
          responsible  for the port of 4.3BSD's networking to 2.10BSD.
          Cyrus Rahman of Duke University should  hold  some  kind  of
          record  for  being  able  to get the entire kernel rewritten
          with a single 10-line bug report.  Much credit  should  also
          go  to  the authors of 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD from which we stole
          everything that wasn't nailed down and several  things  that
          were.   (Just  ``diff'' this document against Changes to the
          Kernel in 4.2BSD if you don't believe that!)   We  are  also
          grateful  for  the  invaluable  guidance provided by Michael
          Karels, of the Computer Science Research Group, at  Berkeley
          -  although we felt that his suggestion that we ``just buy a
          VAX'', while perhaps more practical, was not entirely within
          the spirit of the project.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Note:
     The tape that USENIX will be distributing for the first few weeks
will only support machines with split I/D and floating point hardware.
This is not because any work remains to be done, but because  we  just
haven't had the time to build and test a system.

     Sites wishing to run 2.10BSD should also be aware that  the  net-
working  is  only lightly tested, and that certain hardware has yet to
be ported.  Contact Keith Bostic at  the  above  address  for  current
information as to the status of the networking.  As of August 6, 1987,
the complete 4.3BSD networking is in place and  running,  albeit  with
minor  problems.  The holdup is that only the Interlan Ethernet driver
has been ported, as well as some major space constraints.  Note, if we
decide  to  go  to a supervisor space networking, 2.10 networking will
only run on:

     11/44/53/70/73/83/84
     11/45/50/55 with 18 bit addressing