Atari TT030 and system V

[Dal]

PMSL - shouldn't 'unter' be 'unting' ?

[mfro]

Possibly..

Doubt it (I have a copy). This is a pretty generic book that was kind of the "bible" sold in thousands (if not millions) in Germany. It tries to cover all the different Unix derivatives that were on the market that time (Sys V, BSD, Xenix and all the mess), but not Sys V version 4 (= ASV). Today (and already for ASV) it's of just historic value IMHO (if at all) to get an overview of the big mess that was the Unix market before the main players (most of them still known) emerged. If you really want to code with ASV, the man pages that come with it are of more value.

Quote from another book I just happen to have on my desk:

""The different versions of the UN*X brand operating systems are numbered in a logical sequence: 5, 6, 7, 2, 2.9, 3, 4.0, III, 4.1, V, 4.2, V.2, and 4.3."

[mdivancic]

Any changes with System V, it's been a while...

[tenox]

To be fair I actually didn't have to work on it recently. Everything that I did so far is available on http://atariunix.com/ . When I get some time I plan to make a better/bigger image, utilizing SCSI2SD ability to have multiple LUNs. Now having 256 MB RAM I will be able to build more software, possibly even never GCC

[SoundDoctor]

To be fair I actually didn't have to work on it recently. Everything that I did so far is available on http://atariunix.com/ . When I get some time I plan to make a better/bigger image, utilizing SCSI2SD ability to have multiple LUNs. Now having 256 MB RAM I will be able to build more software, possibly even never GCC

Hey Tenox, how did you resolve the 256mb issue? The last I read on the Magnum thread you could get 128mb but had errors on booting System V.

[tenox]

I forgot about this! Never solved 256MB issue. I just install one jumper to mask half off. 128MB is still awesome. Actually anything beyond 64MB is a splurge. My first HPUX workstation in 1992 had 64MB RAM and it was considered a massive amount at that time

[mdivancic]

Iv'e got 16 in my TT, that going to be enough? Which I could find a REBEL board.

[tenox]

16MB is enough to run Atari Unix. Where it gets tight is if you start to compile a lot of software and with more modern GCC versions which are memory hungry. Unless you are doing this, you will be grand.

[RalfItzehoe]

You cannot mount the /stand (boot) partition (since its bfs formatted - no driver available for Linux).

Yes. No.

I investigated this topic to the point that I understand that there are several, incompatible, versions of BFS (the original one, not BeOS).

Up-to-date Linux (Debian Jessie) contains /usr/src/linux-headers-3.16.0-4-common/include/uapi/linux/bfs_fs.h, which contains the BFS data structures as documented by Martin Hinner (http://martin.hinner.info/fs/bfs/bfs-structure.html). I assume, the bfs-module would mount /stand from the ASV-images if they had the proper format - but they haven't. The mount attempt leads to a message complaining about a wrong magic - effectively, because the byte order of the ASV ist MSB first, while the module expects LSB first.

That observation motivated me to analyse the ASV-header /usr/include/sys/fs/bfs.h from Richard's image. Funny, it contains the comment by its author:

/*
* TEMPORARY!!! Someday soon we should pad this structure
* to make it 4-byte aligned and rebuild all our boot
* filesystems. XXX.aegl
*/

The superblock and the inode structs are different from the later version documented by Martin Hinner, the struct are 2-byte aligned and the inodes have 62 (!) byte. And all data structures are in M68000 byte order.

Based on these facts, I have written a tiny tool to analyse the ASV images and to extract the files from the BFS file systems. The attached source also contains my commented version of the ASV bfs.h header.

[tenox]

This is awesome! Thanks for doing it! I can upload to atariunix.com.

[theteeth07]

I have asv on a hard drive..it no longer boots at all. Are there any utilities on floppy or other that I can run to try and "fix" the hard drive...it is recognized as a scsi device when I boot from ICD but i'm not sure what to try. I may have a tape backup but I need to check the disk out somehow?
Thanks

[mfro]

Here's an ASV boot disk. Write it to a floppy as raw image and boot from it. You might need to interrupt the boot process once the kernel comes up but it should then fallback to a shell prompt. From there, you should be able to mount the ASV partitions and do whatever is necessary to fix them.

[alexb]

I have asv on a hard drive..it no longer boots at all. Are there any utilities on floppy or other that I can run to try and "fix" the hard drive...it is recognized as a scsi device when I boot from ICD but i'm not sure what to try. I may have a tape backup but I need to check the disk out somehow?

Did you set the ASV boot option using BOOTCONF or a similar tool? Easy to forget about that

Otherwise connect the disk to a system where you can make an image copy, so the data isn't lost in case anything happens to the HDD.

[johannes]

Hi Tenox and all other ASV enthusiasts,

Last week I got hold onto a TT which was preloaded with a pretty neat MINT'98 distribution. Nevertheless, on my research advance to collecting the TT I came across the ASV Unix and wanted to see how it works on the TT (Fun fact: I live in Düsseldorf, Germany - where the TT/X Prototypes were presented at the ATARI Fair in 1990 - which I attended, too).

Thanks to your great work I managed to get Richards Image running on my TT using a SCSI2SD and a 32 GB micro SD Card (which is recognized only as 2 GB - but it was the only one flying around). Using my HP "Gecko" with HP-UX 10.20 I was able to dd the image to the card and it instantly worked.

Now I have to get the Riebl VME network adapter up and running. It works with MINT'98 but I assume I have to replace the battery and run the reconfiguration program for reprogramming the Mac Address..

Once I got that working, I will try some ports.

Keep up the good work. Thanks again!

Johannes

[tenox]

Great to hear that! Awesome that you got another TT up and running. Let us know how your experiences with ASV go. There is quite a lot of work to be done between the images. I think that Mark's image has quite bit of additional software that Richard's image doesn't have. Another unsolved mystery so far is relinking the kernel. I was not able to do it to date.

[RalfItzehoe]

Hi Tenox and all other ASV enthusiasts,

(Fun fact: I live in Düsseldorf, Germany - where the TT/X Prototypes were presented at the ATARI Fair in 1990 - which I attended, too).

Johannes

Funny - I attended this fair, too. Worked on my PHD in Aachen at that time. We applied for a development system, and obtained it shortly after. I used two SYSV4-systems throughout my thesis work, until 1994. I ported tons of software - including xnews, gnuplot, xgopher, Mosaic, LaTex, emacs, ghostscript, bash - you name it. In fact, the system enabled me to produce a thesis "without glue" (simulations, graphics, text: pure postscript), which was a first timer in our lab.

Unfortunately, the hardware is lost, and I still hope to get a working emulator sometimes.

[mikro]

Seeing all this success I'm pretty happy that I had made those images public nearly exactly 9 years ago! Thanks to Richard for providing his image and Mark_G for sending me his hard disk (which I had shamefully ignored for two years before imaging it). Wouldn't have imagined so much done with it.

Lesson learned: always share your knowledge and projects, others will help one day or another.

[tenox]

Seeing all this success I'm pretty happy that I had made those images public nearly exactly 9 years ago! Thanks to Richard for providing his image and Mark_G for sending me his hard disk (which I had shamefully ignored for two years before imaging it). Wouldn't have imagined so much done with it.

Lesson learned: always share your knowledge and projects, others will help one day or another.

Man thanks for doing it! We couldn't have it without you.

Some day I will come back to it and do more work. I plan to combine Mark and Richard's images in to one bigger and better image with more software and do more ports of course. Unfortunately at present I'm little pre-occupied with other projects.