carl%UCBERNIE@ucbvax.UUCP (06/30/83)
Date: 29 Jun 83 06:26:16 PDT (Wed)
From: carl@UCBERNIE (Carl Smith)
Subject: 2.9BSD availability
Message-Id: <8306291326.AA12226@UCBERNIE.ARPA>
Received: by UCBERNIE.ARPA (3.336/3.7)
id AA12226; 29 Jun 83 06:26:16 PDT (Wed)
To: net-general@BERKELEY, net-unix-wizards@BERKELEY
Cc: 2bsd-bugs@BERKELEY
We've received a number of requests to post something about the
availability of 2.9BSD. This article is in response to those requests
(and an attempt to cut down our phone bill). Please post any followup
articles to net.unix.2bsd.
AT&T and the University's lawyers have agreed on the format of
our new license and we've begun shipping ordering packets. They have
been sent to anyone who had previously requested one. They have not
yet been sent to those of you who have 2.8BSD tapes.
Copies of the five raw components of a packet have been deposited
in ~uucp/2bsd on ucbvax and may be copied with uucp. There are two parts:
Blurb.ms \
Checklist.ms | publicity and order forms
OrderForm.nr /
License.ms \
| license agreement
ScheduleA.ms /
Note that ScheduleA is enormous (currently 165563 bytes).
Technical questions may be directed to me (carl@berkeley, ucbvax!carl).
A copy of a draft of the paper describing the changes between the 2.8 and 2.9
kernels is available (by electronic mail only) from me. Requests for order
packets should be sent to dist2@berkeley (ucbvax!dist2). If you must, we can
be reached by US mail at
Berkeley PDP-11 Software Distribution - 2BSD
Computer Science Division, Department of EECS
573 Evans Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
or by phone at (415) 642-6258 (although you're not likely to get anything but
an answering machine). Electronic mail is preferred. To answer some of the
most often asked questions, I've included the first couple pages of our
information packet below.
Carl Smith
Second Distribution of Berkeley PDP-11* Software for UNIX**
Release 2.9
(revised June 1983)
A new release of the UNIX system with many enhancements
is available from the Computer Science Division of the
University of California at Berkeley. It is a complete V7
UNIX system, including the kernel, all standard utilities,
and additional Berkeley products. The kernel will run on
any PDP-11 with memory management hardware and at least 192K
bytes of memory, including the 11/23, 11/24, 11/34, 11/34A,
11/40, 11/44, 11/45, 11/55, and 11/70. It supports most
common disks (RK05/06/07, RL01/02, RM02/03/05,
RP03/04/05/06, and emulations of these) and tapes (TM02/03,
TM11, and TS11). With only a few exceptions (pcc and
INGRES), all of the programs in the release will also run on
all of the supported machines. The major kernel changes
since the 2.8BSD distribution are:
o Process control, a mechanism for stopping and restart-
ing jobs in foreground or background, and the new reli-
able signal mechanism that supports it. This is nearly
identical to the process control facility of 4.1BSD
VMUNIX (the Berkeley VAX UNIX system).
o Vfork, a more efficient version of fork.
o Automatic reboots, after crashes or on demand.
o Automatic detection of hardware configuration at boot
time, with most of the configuration-dependent
addresses and vectors in a single ASCII file.
o Much easier kernel configuration process, with most
parameters in one machine description file.
o There are numerous efficiency changes. System overhead
has markedly decreased in a number of areas: floating
point traps (90% decrease) overlay switches (45%
decrease), and system calls (22% decrease).
o There have been many bug fixes. The system is now far
more robust.
Other features of the kernel, which were also in the
_________________________
*DEC, PDP, and VAX are trademarks of Digital Equipment
Corporation.
**UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories.
June 29, 1983
- 2 -
2.8BSD release, include hashing buffers and inodes, moving
buffers and clists out of kernel data space, and the 1K
block filesystem. The system supports kernel overlays,
allowing it to run on nonseparate I/D machines. It also
supports user overlays, so that ex version 3 can be run,
even on nonseparate machines!
The Berkeley tty driver is included; it correctly han-
dles erase and kill characters on crt and printing termi-
nals, including correctly backspacing over tabs and control
characters.
The enhanced Berkeley implementation of the TCP/IP net-
work facility is included.
Changes to the kernel are conditionally compiled with
mnemonic names, making it easy to turn on and off features
you decide you do or do not want. This kernel contains con-
tributions from Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group,
the U.S. Geological Survey system, DEC's UNIX Engineering
Group, and Tektronix (to mention only a few).
This package also includes the instructional Pascal
system, the editor ex, the INGRES database management sys-
tem, and other software (some of which is described below).
Source code, binaries and machine readable versions of all
documentation are included. The distribution is provided on
two 9-track 800BPI magnetic tapes, one of which is bootable
and contains the standalone utilities required to bring up a
root filesystem and the kernel. The remainder of the
sources, documentation and binaries are in tar format,
blocked by a factor of 20 (10240 byte records). Tapes writ-
ten at 1600BPI are available, as are tapes intended for use
on the DEC TS-11 tape drive. We will supply the magnetic
tape(s) on which the software will be written. Distribu-
tions of the software on disk media are not available. Tp
and cpio formats are also not available.