id AA24290; 29 Jun 83 16:20:19 PDT (Wed)

[carl%UCBERNIE at ucbvax.UUCP]

Date: 29 Jun 83 06:26:16 PDT (Wed)
From: carl at UCBERNIE (Carl Smith)
Subject: 2.9BSD availability
Message-Id: <8306291326.AA12226 at UCBERNIE.ARPA>
Received: by UCBERNIE.ARPA (3.336/3.7)
	id AA12226; 29 Jun 83 06:26:16 PDT (Wed)
To: net-general at BERKELEY, net-unix-wizards at BERKELEY
Cc: 2bsd-bugs at BERKELEY

	We've received a number of requests to post something about the
availability of 2.9BSD.  This article is in response to those requests
(and an attempt to cut down our phone bill).  Please post any followup
articles to net.unix.2bsd.
	AT&T and the University's lawyers have agreed on the format of
our new license and we've begun shipping ordering packets.  They have
been sent to anyone who had previously requested one.  They have not
yet been sent to those of you who have 2.8BSD tapes.
	Copies of the five raw components of a packet have been deposited
in ~uucp/2bsd on ucbvax and may be copied with uucp.  There are two parts:
	
	Blurb.ms	       \
	Checklist.ms		|	publicity and order forms
	OrderForm.nr	       /

	License.ms	       \
				|	license agreement
	ScheduleA.ms	       /

Note that ScheduleA is enormous (currently 165563 bytes).
	Technical questions may be directed to me (carl at berkeley, ucbvax!carl).
A copy of a draft of the paper describing the changes between the 2.8 and 2.9
kernels is available (by electronic mail only) from me.  Requests for order
packets should be sent to dist2 at berkeley (ucbvax!dist2).  If you must, we can
be reached by US mail at

	Berkeley PDP-11 Software Distribution - 2BSD
	Computer Science Division, Department of EECS
	573 Evans Hall
	University of California, Berkeley
	Berkeley, CA 94720

or by phone at (415) 642-6258 (although you're not likely to get anything but
an answering machine).  Electronic mail is preferred.  To answer some of the
most often asked questions, I've included the first couple pages of our
information packet below.

			
			Carl Smith



  Second Distribution of Berkeley PDP-11* Software for UNIX**
                        Release 2.9
                    (revised June 1983)





     A new release of the UNIX system with many enhancements
is  available  from  the  Computer  Science  Division of the
University of California at Berkeley.  It is a  complete  V7
UNIX  system,  including the kernel, all standard utilities,
and additional Berkeley products.  The kernel  will  run  on
any PDP-11 with memory management hardware and at least 192K
bytes of memory, including the 11/23, 11/24, 11/34,  11/34A,
11/40,  11/44,  11/45,  11/55,  and 11/70.  It supports most
common    disks    (RK05/06/07,     RL01/02,     RM02/03/05,
RP03/04/05/06,  and emulations of these) and tapes (TM02/03,
TM11, and TS11).   With  only  a  few  exceptions  (pcc  and
INGRES), all of the programs in the release will also run on
all of the supported machines.   The  major  kernel  changes
since the 2.8BSD distribution are:

o    Process control, a mechanism for stopping and  restart-
     ing jobs in foreground or background, and the new reli-
     able signal mechanism that supports it.  This is nearly
     identical  to  the  process  control facility of 4.1BSD
     VMUNIX (the Berkeley VAX UNIX system).

o    Vfork, a more efficient version of fork.

o    Automatic reboots, after crashes or on demand.

o    Automatic detection of hardware configuration  at  boot
     time,   with   most   of   the  configuration-dependent
     addresses and vectors in a single ASCII file.

o    Much easier kernel  configuration  process,  with  most
     parameters in one machine description file.

o    There are numerous efficiency changes.  System overhead
     has  markedly decreased in a number of areas:  floating
     point  traps  (90%  decrease)  overlay  switches   (45%
     decrease), and system calls (22% decrease).

o    There have been many bug fixes.  The system is now  far
     more robust.

     Other features of the kernel, which were  also  in  the
_________________________
*DEC, PDP, and VAX are trademarks of  Digital  Equipment
Corporation.
**UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories.



                       June 29, 1983





                           - 2 -


2.8BSD release, include hashing buffers and  inodes,  moving
buffers  and  clists  out  of  kernel data space, and the 1K
block filesystem.   The  system  supports  kernel  overlays,
allowing  it  to  run  on nonseparate I/D machines.  It also
supports user overlays, so that ex version  3  can  be  run,
even on nonseparate machines!

     The Berkeley tty driver is included; it correctly  han-
dles  erase  and  kill characters on crt and printing termi-
nals, including correctly backspacing over tabs and  control
characters.

     The enhanced Berkeley implementation of the TCP/IP net-
work facility is included.

     Changes to the kernel are conditionally  compiled  with
mnemonic  names,  making it easy to turn on and off features
you decide you do or do not want.  This kernel contains con-
tributions  from Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group,
the U.S. Geological Survey system,  DEC's  UNIX  Engineering
Group, and Tektronix (to mention only a few).

     This package also  includes  the  instructional  Pascal
system,  the  editor ex, the INGRES database management sys-
tem, and other software (some of which is described  below).
Source  code,  binaries and machine readable versions of all
documentation are included.  The distribution is provided on
two  9-track 800BPI magnetic tapes, one of which is bootable
and contains the standalone utilities required to bring up a
root  filesystem  and  the  kernel.   The  remainder  of the
sources, documentation  and  binaries  are  in  tar  format,
blocked  by a factor of 20 (10240 byte records). Tapes writ-
ten at 1600BPI are available, as are tapes intended for  use
on  the  DEC  TS-11 tape drive.  We will supply the magnetic
tape(s) on which the software will  be  written.   Distribu-
tions  of  the software on disk media are not available.  Tp
and cpio formats are also not available.