• The Berkeley Software Distribution (2/2)

    From Ben Collver@21:1/5 to All on Sun Feb 18 18:27:08 2024
    [continued from previous message]

    CSRG, Computer Science Division
    University of California
    Berkeley, CA 94720

    Mike Karels
    Kirk McKusick
    Keith Bostic
    Keith Sklower
    Marc Teitelbaum

    Less than a year later, Bill Jolitz replaced the missing kernel
    pieces and compiled everything for the PC-compatible Intel 80386
    platform, and he released this new distribution as 386/BSD. Only a
    few short months later, a group of 386/BSD users formed NetBSD to
    continue enhancements and releases of Jolitz's system. This occurred
    because Jolitz still had a full-time job, and the number of bug
    fixes, enhancements, and additions coming into his project were
    beyond his capabilities to manage alone. NetBSD has and continues to
    emphasize porting NetBSD to absolutely everything, including but not
    limited to ARM, MIPS, i386, AMD64, SPARC, PowerPC, Motorola 68K, SH3,
    HPPA, Itanium, RISC-V, and VAX. If your toaster has a chip in it,
    NetBSD will probably run on it. NetBSD has also engaged in some
    research and experimentation that has led to many security and system
    hardening technologies, an amazing package management system, kernel
    level hardware virtualization, and some surprising levels of backward compatibility. As is the BSD tradition, NetBSD has also merged in
    changes from systems like Solaris with ZFS.

    [A toaster at the Linux World Expo in 2005, running NetBSD]

    <https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp, q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/ https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2F images%2F9930c00b-0270-4a9d-ae51-bfa22c05721d_499x374.jpeg>

    While NET2 was being worked on and released, the last version of
    2.11BSD was also being prepared and released, but this time by
    USENIX. On the 14th of March in 1991, Steven M. Schultz posted the
    following to comp.sys.dec.micro:

    Second Distribution of Berkeley PDP-11 Software for UNIX
    Release 2.11
    (Revised January 1991)

    The USENIX Association is pleased to announce the distribution of a
    new release of the "Second Berkeley Software Distribution" (2.11BSD).

    This release will be handled by USENIX, 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. The release will
    consist of two 2400 ft. 1600 bpi tapes or one TK50 tape cartridge (approximately 80M) and approximately 100 pages of documentation.

    If you have questions about the distribution of the release, or
    require 800 bpi tapes, please contact USENIX. USENIX's address and
    phone number is as follows:

    2.11BSD
    USENIX Association
    2560 Ninth St. Suite 215
    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
    Steven M. Schultz at:

    s...@wlv.imsd.contel.com
    wlbr!wlv!sms

    This release is in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the
    PDP-11! Work has been ongoing since the release of 2.10.1BSD in
    January 1989. This release incorporates all fixes and changes
    posted to the USENET newsgroup comp.bugs.2bsd since 2.10.1BSD was
    released.

    Present in this release are several more missing pieces from the
    4.3BSD distribution:

    1) the kernel logger (/dev/klog)
    2) the namei cache and argument encapsulation calling sequence
    3) readv(2)/writev(2) as system calls rather than
    emulation/compatibility routines
    4) shadow password file implementation (the May 1989 4.3BSD
    update)
    5) a TMSCP (TK50/TU81) driver with standalone support (boot-block
    and standalone driver)
    6) Pronet and LH/DH IMP networking support
    7) the portable ascii archive file format (ar, ranlib)
    8) the Unibus Mapping RegisterUMR) handling of the network was
    rewritten to avoid allocating excessive UMRs.
    9) the necessary mods to the IP portion of the networking were made
    to allow traceroute (which is present in 2.11BSD) to run
    10) long filenames in the file system

    This last addition is the reason a coldstart kit is necessary. The
    4.3BSD on-disk directory structure has been ported (along with the
    utilities that know about on-disk directories via the raw
    filesystem: fsck, ncheck, icheck, dcheck, etc.) and is not
    compatible with previous versions of UNIX for the PDP-11.

    A limited amount of filesystem backward compatibility with earlier
    versions of 2BSD (2.9BSD, 2.10BSD and 2.10.1BSD) is present in a
    version of dump(8) which can read old filesystems. The disk
    partition sizes have not changed from 2.10.1BSD (the urge to
    standardize the haphazard partition sizes was suppressed in the
    interest of backwards compatibility). The restor(8) utility
    automatically converts old dump tapes to the new format on input.

    The constant MAXNAMLEN is now 63 instead of 14. While it is
    possible the limit could be higher, with MAXPATHLEN at 256 a
    MAXNAMLEN of 63 was judged sufficient.

    MANY other fixes and changes have also been made, see the "Changes
    To The Kernel" document which describes the changes made to both
    the kernel and the application programs.

    Steven M. Schuz
    Contel Federal Systems
    31717 La Tienda Drive
    Westlake Village CA 91359
    s...@wlv.imsd.contel.com
    wlbr!wlv!sms

    A few months after the NetBSD group formed, the FreeBSD group formed.
    They chose to target the PC architecture specifically and to make
    their system a bit easier to use. In contrast to NetBSD which was
    solely a product offered over the internet, the FreeBSD group offered
    their product on CD-ROM. FreeBSD did expand to ARM, PowerPC, and
    MIPS, and like NetBSD they did continue the CSRG spirit of research
    and experimentation with things like bhyve virtualization and jails. Additionally, they have continued the legacy of borrowing the best
    bits of other systems like dtrace, and ZFS, but also via their
    immense collection of software in ports.

    Richard L. Adams Jr (Rick) was the founder of one of the earliest
    internet service providers (if not the first), UUNET, after first
    creating SLIP (TCP/IP over serial). He also maintained the most
    popular usenet transport in the early 1980s, B News. After the
    release of 386/BSD, he got together with Keith Bostic, Marshall Kirk
    McKusick, Mike Karels, and Bill Jolitz and the group founded Berkeley
    Software Design, Inc otherwise known as BSDi. Their first product was
    BSD/386 based off of Networking Release 2 and it first released in
    January of 1992. Their system retailed for $995 (about $2160 in
    2024). The target market for BSDi was the nascent internet
    infrastructure market. In their advertising they touted their β€œ99%
    discount over System V” and advised interested parties to contact 1-800-its-unix.

    Of course, this didn't sit well with Unix System Labs (AT&T
    subsidiary). Shortly after BSDi began sales, they received a cease
    and desist from USL with a particular request to stop using the phone
    number that included β€œit's UNIX,” as the ownership of the UNIX
    trademark was firmly in USL's hands. BSDi complied changing their advertisements, the number, and explaining that BSD wasn't precisely
    UNIX. This, however, wasn't quite enough. USL brought a lawsuit
    against BSDi seeking an injunction against the sale of BSD/386. As
    part of the suit, USL claimed that BSDi's product contained USL code
    and trade secrets, and that further sales of BSDi's product would
    irreparably harm USL. BSDi then claimed that they shouldn't be held
    liable for any code contained in Berkeley's original source
    offerings, but that they were completely willing to discuss the six
    added, BSDi-original files. BSDi's argument won and USL was required
    to restate their complaint or have the case dismissed. USL then filed
    suit against both BSDi and the University of California with roughly
    the same complaints but this time seeking anle and distribution of both Networking Release 2 and BSD/386. The
    employees of both CSRG and BSDi were deposed.

    In December of 1992, US District Judge Debevoise in New Jersey took
    the arguments for injunction under advisement. Six weeks later, he
    dismissed all but two of the complaints and suggested that the matter
    should be taken to a state court before being heard in a federal
    court. The University listened and filed a lawsuit against USL the
    following Monday in California. The suit by the University of
    California claimed that USL had failed to provide credit to the
    University for BSD code contained within System V as required by
    their prior licensing agreement. The University of California wasn't
    asking for financial compensation but rather that USL reprint all of
    their System V documentation with proper credit and attribution for
    BSD code, that USL notify licensees of their mistake, and that USL
    run advertisements in print news publications informing the public of
    USL's mistake.

    On the 21st of December in 1992, Novell announced that it would be
    acquiring Unix System Laboratories including the UNIX copyright,
    trademarks, and licensing contracts. The LA Times stated that this
    transaction was completed with an exchange of stock wherein all of
    the shares of USL would be traded for twelve million three hundred
    thousand ser which USL would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell. Discussions around a settlement of legal proceedings began in the
    summer of 1993, but were not resolved until January of 1994. The
    result was that three files were removed from Networking Release 2,
    minor changes were made to a few other files, and USL copyrights were
    added to about seventy files though the license of those files would
    continue to be the BSD license. On the part of USL, they agreed that
    with those terms met, the company would not bring litigation against
    any company, group, or user who used or distributed the resulting
    open source BSD system.

    That resulting system was 4.4BSD-Lite and 4.4BSD-Encumbered in March
    of 1994. 4.4BSD-Encumbered included the prior USL code and required a
    USL UNIX license. 4.4BSD-Lite was fully free and open source
    software. This version was merged into FreeBSD 2.0, NetBSD 1.0, and a
    newly named BSD/OS which was previously BSD/386. For CSRG, the
    revenue received from 4.4BSD allowed the group to continue as a
    part-time effort integrating bug fixes and enhancements made locally
    and from the BSD community. As focus shifted into the other
    distributions like BSD/OS, NetBSD, and FreeBSD the rate of
    submissions to Berkeley slowed. The final release from the University
    was 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 in June of 1995. This version was merged
    into FreeBSD 3.0, Rhapsody (and later Darwin), NetBSD 1.3, OpenBSD
    2.3, and BSD/OS 3.0.

    By 1995, BSDi's BSD/OS was the most common operating system used in
    the datacenters of the early internet. This is a market that BSDi had intentionally targeted, and this would prove to be a sword of
    Damocles. The strand of hair holding the sword broke as the Dot Com
    Bubble began bursting and BSDi merged with Walnut Creek which itself
    was later sold to Wind River Systems.

    Today, BSD is among the most common operating systems on Earth
    despite people not recognizing it as such. Modern macOS descends from
    4.4BSD, as do NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Dragonfly BSD, and a few
    others. In the past, various versions of BSD formed the basis of
    SunOS, DYNIX, NeXTSTEP, Ultrix, and Tru64. Various editions of BSD
    were merged into AT&T UNIX, and this means that modern commercial
    UNIX systems like AIX and HP-UX are also running some BSD code. BSD
    has been used in many commercial products owning to its permissive
    licensing, and some of the most notable of those are the Sony
    Playstation 3, 4, and Vita, the Netflix Open Connect Appliance,
    Juniper routers, Isilon IQ clustered storage systems, Dell Compellent
    storage systems, and the Weather Channel's IntelliStar forecast
    computer.

    From: <https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution>

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)