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After 22 Years, 386BSD Gets An Update (386bsd.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the jumpstarting-Jolix dept.

386BSD was last released back in 1994 with a series of articles in Dr. Dobb's Journal -- but then developers for this BSD-based operating system started migrating to both FreeBSD and NetBSD. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The last known public release was version 0.1. Until Wednesday, when Lynne Jolitz, one of the co-authors of 386BSD, released the source code to version 1.0 as well as 2.0 on Github.

386BSD takes us back to the days when you could count every file in your Unix distribution and more importantly, read and understand all of your OS source code. 386BSD is also the missing link between BSD and Linux. One can find fragments of Linus Torvalds's math emulation code in the source code of 386BSD. To quote Linus: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Though it was designed for Intel 80386 microprocessors, there's already instructions for launching it on the hosted hardware virtualization service Qemu.

11 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... What? Somebody makes 386BSD and releases version 0.1... and then works not only on a full, shiny 1.0, but also on a whole new generation (2.0)... and don't release the two latter ones? Just develop them and sit on them? What?! That's the real news. Not even an attempt to explain it, of course, so one is left with a hundred questions instead of learning anything.

    1. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by freeze128 · · Score: 2

      Maybe now it runs on a 386SX....

    2. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by bkmoore · · Score: 2

      Maybe now it runs on a 386SX....

      Wasn't it possible with some 386 SX chips to drill a tiny hole in the CPU, and make it into a DX? Or was that an urban myth, like drilling a headphone jack into your new iPhone?

    3. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Considering the SX had a 16 bit bus compared to the DX's 32 bit I really do not see how drilling a hole would magically change that.

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    4. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You'd be surprised at how much code is out there that haven't been released just because there is a minor bug to be fixed or some strange problem to be solved.
      A lot of the people I know have hundreds of projects that have been on hold or abandoned for things more interesting.

      Also, the difference between 0.1 and 1.0 might not be as big as the numbers hint at, they are just arbitrary version numbers after all.
      As we know from software like Windows, Foxit Reader and PSP it even happens that the best version isn't the one with the highest version number.

    5. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      He's probably thinking of the 486DX. The original 486 had an FPU, but the yields were low so Intel split the line into the 486SX (no FPU) and the 486DX (with FPU). Some motherboards let you plug in a 487 as an external FPU, but this was often really just a 486DX that took over completely. The 486SX was identical to the DX, but had the FPU disabled. It was possible to reenable it, and it would typically work most of the time. For gaming, this was fine (the occasional floating point error probably didn't make a difference) and was a cheap way of getting much more performance.

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    6. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by 0dugo0 · · Score: 2

      1.0 was released as CD-ROM, but by that time everyone was running NetBSD, FreeBSD or Linux on their x86 boxen. In the circle of maybe 10 people that actually care about historical stuff like this it was known there was a 2.0, but unknown where and if it was ever released by the Jolitzes.

    7. Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual. by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

      I think there's an InfoMagic CD-ROM set with this 386BSD version and also a pre 1.0 NetBSD on it. It's over there somewhere in that pile against the wall here.

      The Jolitzes also wrote a book on the codebase that appears to still be available.

  2. Hope for Hurd yet? by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hurd comes from the same era. I think some people are still tinkering with it.

  3. Internet's early days by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Interesting. An ISP I worked at used BSDi in it's formative years.... the proprietary version of BSD from which 386BSD originated.
    The ISP runs FreeBSD now, of course.

    Speaking of which.... FreeBSD 11 is due for release any day now....

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    1. Re:Internet's early days by augustw · · Score: 2

      386BSD and BSDi both originated, independently, from the NET & NET/2 releases of BSD from the CSRG.
      Neither was a derivative of the other.
      NetBSD and FreeBSD are descendents of 386BSD.