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bsdimp

111 karma · joined February 18, 2015

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bsdimp··on Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
I yesterday set chatgpt to a coding task. It utterly failed. Its error handling was extensive, but wrong. It didn't know file formats. It couldn't write the code when i told it the format. The structure of the code sucked. The style was worse. I've never had to work so hard for such garbage. I could have knocked it out from scratch faster with higher quality.
bsdimp··on First Edition Unix Manual 'Miscellaneous' Section (1971) [pdf]
PWB Unix was the earliest sources I could find. FreeBSD lists history items for releases going back to the earliest unix release because BSD Unix is derived from AT&T Research Unix and FreeBSD is derived from 4.4BSD...

The tabs file does predate this, and I'll make a note of that (which is what this article is about).

bsdimp··on Show HN: Compile for Arm at native speeds in an emulated system
You forgot the following steps: Profile to see what's the slowest thing Make a native version of that. In FreeBSD package builder setup, we also have /bin/sh and a few other heavily used binaries that are native because it shaves hours or days off a package run (itself takes 10 days, even optimized like this).
bsdimp··on Show HN: Compile for Arm at native speeds in an emulated system
I know the qemu-bsd-user fork has some hacks for the bsd-user stuff that looks at the binary to be exec'd and does different things based on the target since there's some optimizations you can get out of this if you don't rely on the kernel 100%... Bits of them may even be in my latest patch-set :)
bsdimp··on Show HN: Compile for Arm at native speeds in an emulated system
FreeBSD has used this same trick for half a dozen years or so to build arm, mips and riscv binaries using fast Intel servers. The FreeBSD build system can build itself to produce binaries for the target (so the compilers run natively) and qemu handles the rest with user-mode emulation via bsd-user (which I happen to be in the process of upstreaming).
bsdimp··on A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
Shar's workaround is for leading white space. This is change is for not assuming traling newlines.
bsdimp··on A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
It absolutely shared history with Larry Wall's patch.... It took the 2.0 sources and started improving them. I ran across a blurb about this somewhere. Also, the code structure is clearly derivative: variable names, function names, wording of messages.
bsdimp··on A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
The question too is whether UNIX is copyrighted due to the pre-berne convention distribution of the system w/o copyright notices... And there's also a question of latches as well should this ever be litigated (I suspect it won't, but I never anticipated the SCO suit, so there you go).
bsdimp··on A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
True. I'd been looking at an older version of gnu patch when I thought it hadn't been patched to fix this... It looks like it had a while ago...
bsdimp··on Bootstrapping 2.11 Backwards
Binary format changes are never fun to go through forwards... This blog entry explains how the 2.11BSD restoration project did it backwards as a step towards creating the boot tapes for the original system...
bsdimp··on In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
Git's role would be to record the system incrementally as each patch is applied. I've already worked all the way back to the unpatched system. I assume that if I got it right, then I'll be able to rebuild. I've mostly been able to, and I'm investigating the mostly. Plus, I'm making sure that it's 100% reproducible so anybody can down the TUHS artifacts, run my scripts and have release 0 tapes, and a git repo of all the changes. And historians will be able to see what's definitely original, and my reconstructions of missing changes to programs. Those we'll never know to a higher degree of 'consistent with everything else'
bsdimp··on In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
No. 2.11BSDpl195 is the earliest one available. It's what was on the old PUPS disk... PUPS became TUHS (http://www.tuhs.org) and this is the oldest one there and none of the old timers that ran 2BSD in PDP11 have the original tapes.
bsdimp··on In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
It's my COVID-19 insomnia project...
bsdimp··on In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
It's hard to reverse apply 'rm /usr/src/bin/ld.c' in the instructions to patch 160, for example. You have to reconstruct ld.c from 2.10.1BSD, and then add missing changes to get it to work...
bsdimp··on In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
The whole reason I did this project was to get back to patch level 0 so I could create a github repo of all the 2.11BSD patches....
bsdimp··on FreeBSD Renames “Master Boot Record” to “Main Boot Record”
This will be reverted.
bsdimp··on Ask HN: Do you still code in BASIC?
The last actual BASIC I wrote was in 1985.
bsdimp··on The Earliest Unix Code: An Anniversary Source Code Release
Nobody! There were no copyright notices, and this is a work made before the US adopted the BERN convention. Prior copyright law required copyright notices.

We learned from the ATT vs Regents case that a judge ruled there was a large likelihood that AT&T couldn't establish it had a valid copyright on V32 because they never marked it properly.

bsdimp··on The Earliest Unix Code: An Anniversary Source Code Release
SIMH now has a reason to upgrade to support Graphics2: Looks like the spacewar source uses it!
bsdimp··on Hunting down Ken's PDP-7: video footage found
It's not QR code, per se, but something quite similar...
bsdimp··on The PDP-7 Where Unix Began
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first-p... has some further speculation... Footage of the PDP-7 that ken would later use to create Unix.
bsdimp··on The PDP-7 Where Unix Began
They ported because there was a user base that liked the commends and environment and wanted to keep using it. It was a rewrite from scratch to the same design spec.
bsdimp··on FreeBSD 10.3
For those numbers, it was around 18 real cores with hyper threading enabled. Crypto is a great workload for hyper threads. These systems are currently being built up and aren't yet in production. These are with last year's CPUs.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/ has the currently deployed system specs.

bsdimp··on “RNG broken for last 4 months”
You can find the following slides from BSDCan 2013 that state Netflix runs FreeBSD 9.

https://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.p...

bsdimp··on “RNG broken for last 4 months”
Netflix has said publicly that they run FreeBSD 10 stable. Here's a slide deck from 2013 that says they were running FreeBSD 9 at the time.