rsalz@uunet.UU.NET (Rich Salz) (09/24/87)
Submitted-by: bostic%okeeffe@berkeley.edu (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
+1 415 528-8649
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
keith@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
+1 415 642-4948
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