2.11BSD_X44: A 2.11 BSD that's still receiving patches, including x86 support | Hacker News Reader

2.11BSD_X44: A 2.11 BSD that's still receiving patches, including x86 support

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30 pointsjmmv14 comments

2.x BSD was also ported to MIPS and some other archs a while back: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd

I have periodically wondered why we didn't see more of that. It's a small monolithic Unix with the complete stack, including (now rather ancient) TCP/IP networking. Fits in 1 MB of RAM with room to spare. BSD licenced.

From what I remember off the biggest issues are probably that: 1) it is pretty closely tied to the PDP-11 architecture (though not insurmountably) 2) it's pre-ANSI C.

Does 2.x BSD really include TCP/IP networking?

2.11 does

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/sys/netin...

to my surprise 2.9 does as well

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/sy...

Yes.

https://github.com/AaronJackson/2.11BSD/blob/main/sys/netine...

Depends on the version though. There's a bunch of patches made to 2.11BSD over the unstoppable march of time.

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patch...

That's wild. <4BSD was never on my radar at all, from my first encounters in 1990.

Morally, this isn't really 2.11 anymore after so much backporting and updating, so my questions would be, what's the utility of such a platform, if not nostalgia or legacy support?

Not clear which arches are supported, aside from i386. My love affair with Open/NetBSD was partially sparked by its enormous roster of cool hardware support.

1989-90 you could still dial in to "Nyx", a PDP-11 at University of Denver, running 2.? BSD. The big attraction was Usenet access, Nyx probably got it via uucp.

Universities maintained legacy systems for sure, but in 1989, 4.3 was already a mature, gold standard, for the right hardware.

Personally I was put on SVR3/3B2, and SunOS on IPX/SLC type systems, along with an awareness of all kinds of other stuff available there, such as a "recreational" 4.3BSD VAX.

2.11BSD is still a popular choice if you have a PDP-11 (or are emulating one).

Oddly, I dialed in to Nyx from a 3b2. Paid extra for SVr3 to get that newfangled Korn shell.

Was there some CDC gear laying around in the back, cause if so we might have gone to the same place (where I ran some of the 4.3/VAX, recreationally).

My understanding is that 2bsd is 16 bit clean, which is most of the reason it is still around. A nice OS to run on your 16-bit micro controllers.

However when trying to fact check myself, I found many of the architecture targets are 32-bit, so I may be wrong about this.