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From: bostic@toe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce
Subject: The 4.4BSD-Lite distribution announcement
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd
Date: 20 Apr 1994 17:49:19 -0700
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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COMPUTER SYSTEMS RESEARCH GROUP
COMPUTER SCIENCE DIVISION, EECS
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94720
(510) 642-7780
March 1, 1994
Dear Colleague:
We are delighted, at long last, to send you information
about our March 1994 release of 4.4BSD-Lite. The University
and UNIX System Laboratories have resolved the issues sur-
rounding the second BSD Networking Release (Net/2) distribu-
tion (see attached press release), and the University is now
able to release 4.4BSD-Lite. We strongly recommend that you
replace any Net/2 source or binary code with 4.4BSD-Lite.
The 4.4BSD-Lite software is copyrighted by the Univer-
sity of California and others, but may be freely redistri-
buted without fee. It is available to anyone and requires
no previous license from AT&T, Novell/USL, or The Regents of
the University of California. The distribution includes
both software developed at Berkeley and much software con-
tributed by authors outside Berkeley. The code in this dis-
tribution may be redistributed and used in released products
without fee, if the due credit, copyright notice, and other
requirements described in the license and the source files
are met.
This packet is intended to serve two purposes. The
first is to acquaint you with the details of our distribu-
tion so you may decide if you wish to purchase it. The
second is to inform you how to obtain our distribution.
Distribution contents
The distribution is a source distribution only, and
does not contain program binaries for any architecture. It
will not be possible to compile or run this software without
a pre-existing system that is already installed and running.
In addition, the distribution does not include sources for a
complete system. It includes source code and manual pages
for the C library, approximately 90% of the utilities dis-
tributed as part of 4.4BSD, and most of the kernel (the same
subsystems that were deleted in Net/2 are still missing in
4.4BSD-Lite - support for executing files, doing physical
I/O, managing the buffer cache, handling process tracing,
terminal character I/O, and doing accounting). Because the
Computer Systems Research Group has shut down (other than a
brief reunion to put together this release), there will not
be anyone available at Berkeley to assist with problems, so
sites are encouraged to ensure enough local expertise to
find and fix any problems that are encountered.
We have attempted to make the system as compliant with
the ANSI C and IEEE POSIX 1003.1 and 1003.2 standards as was
possible at the time of its release. We have not run it
through any of the verification test suites, thus, you
should not claim conformance with either standard without
first validating the code.
This software distribution is only available on two
6250bpi 1/2'' 9-track tapes or one 8mm Exabyte cassette.
The 4.4BSD-Lite distribution contains source for the follow-
ing architectures:
+ HP 9000/300 68000-based workstations,
+ DECstation 3100 and 5000 MIPS-based workstations,
+ Sparcstation I & II SPARC-based workstations (Please
note that the distribution does not support the Sparcs-
tation 10.),
+ Sony News MIPS-based workstations,
+ Omron Luna 68000-based workstations,
+ Intel 386/486-based machines (ISA/AT or EISA bus only).
The distribution does not include the machine support for
the Tahoe and VAX architectures found in previous BSD dis-
tributions. Our primary development environment is the
HP9000/300 series machines. The other architectures are
developed and supported by people outside the university.
Consequently, we are not able to directly test or maintain
these other architectures, so cannot comment on their
robustness, reliability, or completeness. More specifi-
cally, the support for the x86 architectures is known to be
unstable.
The major new facilities available in the 4.4BSD-Lite
release are a new virtual memory system, the addition of
ISO/OSI networking support, a new virtual filesystem inter-
face supporting filesystem stacking, a freely redistribut-
able implementation of NFS, a log-structured filesystem,
enhancement of the local filesystems to support files and
filesystems that are up to 2**63 bytes in size, an ISO CDROM
9660 filesystem with Rockridge extensions, enhanced security
and system management support, and the conversion to and
addition of the IEEE Std1003.1 (``POSIX'') facilities and
many of the IEEE Std1003.2 facilities. In addition, many
new tools and additions to the C library are present. The
kernel sources have been reorganized to collect all
machine-dependent files for each architecture under one
directory, and most of the machine-independent code is now
free of code conditional on specific machines. The user
structure and process structure have been reorganized to
eliminate the statically-mapped user structure and to make
most of the process resources shareable by multiple
processes. The system and include files have been converted
to be compatible with ANSI C, including function prototypes
for the exported functions. There are numerous other
changes throughout the system.
The new virtual memory implementation is derived from
the MACH operating system developed at Carnegie-Mellon
University, and was ported to the BSD kernel at the Univer-
sity of Utah. The MACH virtual memory system call interface
has been replaced with the ``mmap''-based interface
described in the ``Berkeley Software Architecture Manual''
(see the UNIX Programmer's Manual, Supplementary Documents,
PSD:5). The interface is similar to the interfaces shipped
by several commercial vendors such as Sun, Novell/USL, and
Convex Computer Corp., and as described by POSIX 1003.4.
The integration of the new virtual memory is functionally
complete, but still has serious performance problems under
heavy memory load. The internal kernel interfaces have not
yet been completed and the memory pool and buffer cache have
not been merged.
The ISO/OSI Networking consists of a kernel implementa-
tion of transport class 4 (TP-4), connectionless networking
protocol (CLNP), and 802.3-based link-level support
(hardware-compatible with Ethernet*). We also include sup-
port for ISO Connection-Oriented Network Service, X.25, TP-
0. The session and presentation layers are provided outside
the kernel by the ISO development environment (ISODE).
Included in this development environment are file transfer
and management (FTAM), virtual terminals (VT), a directory
services implementation (X.500), and miscellaneous other
utilities.
A new virtual filesystem interface has been added to
the kernel to support multiple filesystems. In comparison
with other interfaces, the Berkeley interface has been
structured for more efficient support of filesystems that
maintain state (such as the local filesystem). The inter-
face has been extended with support for stackable filesys-
tems done at UCLA. These extensions allow for filesystems
to be layered on top of each other and allow new vnode
operations to be added without requiring changes to existing
filesystem implementations.
In addition to the local ``fast filesystem'', we have
added an implementation of the network filesystem (NFS) that
fully interoperates with the NFS shipped by Sun and its
licensees. Because our NFS implementation was implemented
using only the publicly available NFS specification, it does
not require a license from Sun to use in source or binary
form. By default it runs over UDP to be compatible with
Sun's implementation. However, it can be configured on a
per-mount basis to run over TCP. Using TCP allows it to be
used quickly and efficiently through gateways and over
long-haul networks. Using an extended protocol, it supports
Leases to allow a limited callback mechanism that greatly
reduces the network traffic necessary to maintain cache con-
sistency between the server and its clients.
A new log-structured filesystem has been added that
provides near disk-speed output and fast crash recovery. It
is still experimental in the 4.4BSD-Lite release, so we do
not recommend it for production use. We have also added a
memory-based filesystem that runs in pageable memory, allow-
ing large temporary filesystems without requiring dedicated
physical memory.
The local ``fast filesystem'' has been enhanced to do
clustering which allows large pieces of files to be allo-
cated contiguously resulting in near doubling of filesystem
throughput. The filesystem interface has been extended to
allow files and filesystems to grow to 2**63 bytes in size.
The quota system has been rewritten to support both user and
group quotas (simultaneously if desired). Quota expiration
is based on time rather than the previous metric of number
of logins over quota. This change makes quotas more useful
on fileservers onto which users seldom login.
The system security has been greatly enhanced by the
addition of additional file flags that permit a file to be
marked as immutable or append only. Once set, these flags
can only be cleared by the super-user when the system is
running single user. To protect against indiscriminate
reading or writing of kernel memory, all writing and most
reading of kernel data structures must be done using a new
``sysctl'' interface. The information to be accessed is
described through an extensible ``Management Information
Base'' (MIB).
The 4.4BSD-Lite distribution contains most of the
interfaces specified in the IEEE Std1003.1 system interface
standard. The biggest area of change is a new terminal
driver. The terminal driver meets the POSIX interface with
the addition of the necessary extensions to get the
functionality previously available in the 4.3BSD terminal
driver. 4.4BSD-Lite also adds the IEEE Std1003.1 job con-
trol interface, which is similar to the 4.3BSD job control
interface, but adds a security model that was missing in the
4.3BSD job control implementation. Other additions include
IEEE Std1003.1 signals, FIFOs, byte-range file locking, and
saved user and group identifiers.
There are several new tools and utilities included in
this release. A new version of make allows much-simplified
makefiles for the system software and allows compilation for
multiple architectures from the same source tree (which may
be mounted read-only). Notable additions to the libraries
include functions to traverse a filesystem hierarchy, data-
base interfaces to btree and hashing functions, a new, fast
implementation of stdio and radix and merge sort functions.
The additions to the utility suite include greatly enhanced
versions of programs that display system status information,
new implementations of various traditional tools described
in the IEEE Std1003.2 standard, and many others.
We have been tracking the IEEE Std1003.2 shell and
utility work and have included prototypes of many of the
proposed utilities. Because most of the traditional utili-
ties have been replaced with implementations conformant to
the POSIX standards, you should realize that the utility
software may not be as stable, reliable or well documented
as in traditional Berkeley releases. In particular, almost
the entire manual suite has been rewritten to reflect the
POSIX defined interfaces, and in some instances it does not
correctly reflect the current state of the software. It is
also worth noting that, in rewriting this software, we have
generally been rewarded with significant performance
improvements. Most of the libraries and header files have
been converted to be compliant with ANSI C. The default
compiler (gcc) is a superset of ANSI C, but supports tradi-
tional C as a command-line option. The system libraries and
utilities all compile with either ANSI or traditional C.
Work has also progressed in several other areas.
Several important enhancements have been added to the TCP/IP
protocols including TCP header prediction and serial line IP
(SLIP) with header compression. Ethernet multicast support
is now available. The routing implementation has been com-
pletely rewritten to use a hierarchical routing tree with a
mask per route to support the arbitrary levels of routing
found in the ISO protocols. The routing table also stores
and caches route characteristics to speed the adaptation of
the throughput and congestion avoidance algorithms.
The Kerberos (version 4) authentication software has
been integrated into much of the system (including NFS) to
provide the first real network authentication on BSD.
This release includes several important structural ker-
nel changes. The kernel uses a new internal system call
convention; the use of global (``u-dot'') variables for
parameters and error returns has been eliminated, and inter-
rupted system calls no longer abort using non-local goto's
(longjmp's). A new sleep interface separates signal han-
dling from scheduling priority, returning characteristic
errors to abort or restart the current system call. This
sleep call also passes a string describing the process
state, which is used by the ps(1) program. The old sleep
interface can be used only for non-interruptible sleeps.
The sleep interface (tsleep) can be used at any priority,
but is only interruptible if the PCATCH flag is set. When
interrupted, tsleep returns EINTR or ERESTART.
Many data structures that were previously statically
allocated are now allocated dynamically. These structures
include mount entries, file entries, user open file descrip-
tors, the process entries, the vnode table, the name cache,
and the quota structures.
How to obtain 4.4BSD-Lite
To obtain 4.4BSD-Lite we require execution of the
Berkeley License Agreement (3/94). In addition, foreign
licensees must execute Addendum Number One for Foreign
Licensees in ordering 4.4BSD-Lite. The fee is $1000.00 for
4.4BSD-Lite.
Because we are a research and development organization
and not a commercial organization, we make our research
results available for a small license fee. We distribute
only the whole system ``As Is'' and cannot send individual
pieces of the system. We are required by the University of
California to have a formal license arrangement with each
organization to which we distribute.
Specifically, for 4.4BSD-Lite, we must receive from
your organization the following material before the distri-
bution can be sent:
+ Two original signed and executed copies of the Berkeley
License Agreement (3/94) between your company or insti-
tution and The Regents of the University of California
along with Exhibit A properly filled out. For Foreign
licensees, there is an Addendum to the License Agree-
ment that must also be executed. Please have this
person's name and title typed in the available space in
addition to the signature. One signed copy of the
Berkeley License Agreement will be returned to you
after it has been executed by The Regents of the
University of California.
+ A check from a U.S. bank for $1000.00 must be received
before the distribution can be sent. Checks should be
made payable to ``The Regents of the University of Cal-
ifornia, Computer Systems Research Group.'' If you must
issue a Purchase Order, together with your prepayment,
please issue one that is blank-backed. If this is not
possible, insert and initial in the body of the Pur-
chase Order the following clause: ``The terms and con-
ditions of this Purchase Order are not accepted by The
Regents of the University of California. The revised
Berkeley License Agreement (3/94) prevails.'' Wire
transfers are strongly discouraged.
+ The attached Site Information Form completely filled
out. Your copy of the signed 4.4BSD-Lite License
Agreement will be sent to the person listed as the
administrative contact. The distribution itself will
be sent to the technical contact. All information is
kept confidential; it is for our use in notifying you
of important bug fixes. Please note that we cannot
ship to post office boxes; therefore, please have the
technical contact's address supplied without use of a
post office box.
A checklist is included to aid you in assembling this
material. All the above material must be sent to:
Pauline Schwartz, Distribution Coordinator
Computer Systems Research Group
Computer Science Division, EECS
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
Once all these items have been received and are in proper
order, the distribution will be sent to the technical
address listed on the Site Information Form. We cannot pro-
vide delivery dates. Once the material is assembled and
packaged, the distribution is shipped by commercial carrier.
Order of shipment will be based on time of arrival of the
properly completed paperwork. Because of the differential
in costs of shipping outside the United States, we ask that
organizations outside the continental United States pay the
collect shipping charges. If the destination is one where
collect shipment cannot be made by the carrier, then advance
payment of the shipping charges will be required.
The most expedient way to ensure that your full distri-
bution is sent as quickly as possible is to include in a
single package two original copies of the appropriate Berke-
ley License Agreement completed and properly signed (without
change), the appropriate check properly made out to ``The
Regents of the University of California, Computer Systems
Research Group'' and a completely filled out Site Informa-
tion Form and to send this single package to the address
noted above.
Please note that if you modify the Berkeley License
Agreement, you may experience a delay of three months or
more before receiving an acceptance or denial of the
changes. We reserve the right to cancel your application if
we have not received the requested paperwork within 60 days
from the date it was sent to us.
Special Cases
University of California Sites. If you are a part of
the University of California, the following items must be
sent to the Computer Systems Research Group: 1) a letter of
authorization signed by the Director or Head of Department
requesting 4.4BSD-Lite, stating that you have read and
understood the Berkeley License Agreement (3/94) and that
your organization will abide by it; 2) an IOC for $1,000.00;
and 3) a Site Information Form.
A Special Note
The procedures and rules set out in this document are
University constraints that must be followed for the distri-
bution of software to be possible. The Computer Systems
Research Group has no control over these constraints and
must reject your application if material submitted is not in
order. If you have questions about the licensing process
after reading this letter, you may call Pauline Schwartz at
(510) 642-7780, write to her, or contact her via electronic
mail at pauline@cs.berkeley.edu.
Sincerely yours,
Marshall Kirk McKusick
Keith Bostic
Computer Systems Research Group
_________________________
*Ethernet is a trademark of the Xerox Corporation.