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From: bos...@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix,comp.bugs.2bsd
Subject: 2.10BSD release
Message-ID: <19727@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Wed, 15-Jul-87 14:40:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.19727
Posted: Wed Jul 15 14:40:59 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jul-87 07:21:51 EDT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 198
Keywords: 2.10BSD, pdp11, UNIX
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 have questions about the distribution of the release,
please contact USENIX. USENIX's address and phone number are 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 and Casey Leedom at:
{ucbvax,seismo}!keith
ke...@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
+1 415 642-4948
For everyone's information, the most asked questions from last
week's mail:
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
If we decide to go to a supervisor space networking, 2.10 net-
working will only run on:
11/44/53/70/73/83/84
11/45/50/55 with 18 bit addressing
Otherwise, 2.10 networking will run on any machine with split
I/D.
The tape that USENIX will be distributing for the next 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 sys-
tem. If anyone doesn't have split I/D and/or floating point and
would be interested in beta testing such a system, please contact
Keith Bostic.
Q: Will 2.10BSD support networking, and, if so, what flavor?
The tape that USENIX will be distributing for the first few
weeks will not support networking. The complete 4.3BSD network-
ing 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. We also may hold off on
the networking until we have it running in supervisor space.
That decision has not yet been made. In either case, the net-
working tape will be available Real Soon Now. Feel free to go
ahead and order the release; just make it very clear that you
want to wait for the networking version.
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 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 directory it's reading.
+ 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 frequently used inodes. Creation,
modification and access times are now stored in kernel
inodes, dramatically speeding up stat 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 Our Favorite Tim-
ing: Ultrix 11, V3.0, on an 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 uses vfork. Once
2.10BSD has the vi image in its core cache, it takes .2
system seconds.
+ Finally, many other speedups, such as rewriting several
C library routines in assembler, replacing the kernel
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 memory like there's some kind of reward. We may fix the
latter by moving it 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. The networking was done by
Jeff Johnson of the Institute for Social Research. 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 and Jeff Johnson, both of the
Institute for Social Research, and Steven Uitti of Purdue
University. 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 Systems 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.
Keith Bostic
Casey Leedom
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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!bostic
From: bos...@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.2bsd
Subject: 2.10BSD
Message-ID: <20891@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 21-Sep-87 12:15:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.20891
Posted: Mon Sep 21 12:15:13 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Sep-87 03:25:41 EDT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 62
Keywords: PDP-11, 2.10BSD, networking, distribution
This is a follow-up to the recent 2.10BSD announcement,
to clarify its current state.
The USENIX Association has started shipping tapes.
They have provided informational packets to approximately 35
sites, and have requests for approximately 20 tapes. They
are currently having a minor problem with sites that are not
returning all the requested information, in particular, the
type of tape drive that will be used to boot from. Order
forms for 2.10BSD may also be found in the next issue of the
USENIX magazine, ``Login:''.
The networking is being shipped as part of the current
system. Hardware support is provided for the DEQNA, DEUNA,
Interlan, and SLIP. If anyone is interested in getting the
Pronet hardware support running, please contact me, I'd be
interested in seeing it done. The networking is NOT in
supervisor space, and will therefore run on any machine with
split I/D space. If anyone is interested in porting the
networking to supervisor space, please contact me, I'd be
interested in seeing it done.
Keith Bostic
------------------------------------------------------------
To recap, for anyone who has not yet seen this informa-
tion:
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 associa-
tion, 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 follows:
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
ke...@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
+1 415 642-4948
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