[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]
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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 β99%
discount over System Vβ 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 βit's UNIX,β 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.
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