RL02 version of UNIX6?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Feb 1 11:19:46 CST 2017


    > From: William Degnan

    > Can one be made using simH to dump and set up for RL02 that can then be
    > ported as a RL02 disk image to actual RL02 drive?

I see someone has already provided a pointer to someone who ha done this; I'm
not sure if that system will boot on a hardware 11/40, or if it was built with
m45.s, or some simlar issue.

It would be pretty easy for anyone with a working V6 UNIX (either on hardware,
or emulated) to do this, _iff_ they have a V6 RL driver. ('Vanilla' V6 does
not include one.) My 'Bringing up V6 under Ersatz-11' page describes one:

  http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html#rl

You might want to get familiar with building V6 kernels, _any_ hardware
variations you wish to support (e.g. more than one DL11 seria line) will
involve re-building the kernel. Not to worry, it's a pretty simple process, it
only takes a few commands, and a few moments (more on a real machine, of
course :-).

That page include almost all the directions on how to do so, but note that one
must also edit 'rootdev' in c.c if the root file system is to be on an RL (no,
mkconf as distributed with 'vanilla' V6 won't do any of the legwork for you,
it does not know about RL drives).


Note that running 'vanilla' V6 Unix i) has some bugs/issue (e.g. you can't
set the date to this century; the user interface is _strictly_ for printing
terminals, etc, etc, etc), some of which are handled here:

  http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html#Issues

so I would advise checking it out. (You can skip all the Ersatz-11-specific
stuff, like the 'DOS Device' to allow Unix to read files from the host
file-system - a very useful capability in an emulated Unix!)


    > From: Angelo Papenhoff

    > http://www.tom-yam.or.jp/2238/rl/

Note that his page says "bootblock is rluboot from v6_rl02_unknown, which
lacks the source code"; I disassembled and commented the code, see above
links.

	Noel


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