Venix Archive Questions + BIOS Driver

[NCommander]

Hope this is the right place to leave a note, I came across this archive of Venix stuff, and I've actually been working on writing a driver to allow Venix to use int 13h to talk to the HDD so it could run with an XT-IDE and/or in VirtualBox. I've actually gotten to the point that basic disk I/O works (and I just managed to get it to dynamically read disk geometry), and trying to figure out how to get XFER's partitioning tools to work properly.

I'm somewhat curious where most of this archive came from, most of what I've seen has been just the backup disks that popped up, but this seems to have a lot of the original media and more.

I'm hoping to be able to get the partition problems solved, and then just one or two left. I've had to do considerable patching in low.s to get this far, but well, at least its there on the reconf kit.

[bsdimp]

I think you'll need to look at the xt or at drivers to see how disk partitioning is done. It's hard-wired in Venix and I think the installers may know about it somehow. Traditionally, V7 ports that understood the partition table did it in the disk drivers themselves.

[Mellvik]

Hi NCommander, I just noticed your issue posting (late I know). I'm interested in the status of your work. I've been thinking about doing the same thing - for the same purpose - getting Venix to work in emulators. And BTW I'm the source of the reconf kit.

You'll find the partitioning stuff in the XFER and/or the uboot directories (the ddisk utility is run by the Ofer floppy to do the partitioning) - all the sources are present, so you should be able to do whatever you want. Including creating support for using the full capacity of 1.44MB floppies.

If you have something to share, maybe you can push it?

--M

[Mellvik]

Hi @bsdimp, @NCommander -

some very good news: Venix is now operational on the 86Box Emulator running on a Mac.

I plan to submit instructions and configuration files in a PR as soon as I can get the stuff organized (and some more testing done).

--Mellvik

[NCommander]

I've managed to get it working on PCem before. I wrote a int 13h driver, and did a bit more patching for floppy disk size to let it run on modern hardware as long as it had a semi-compatible BIOS. Not perfect, and I had to fix a few bugs to get that far, but at least functional to the point I was able to install it to a USB stick (there was deep magic involved)

[Mellvik]

Thank you Michael, That's very encouraging. Any chance you can upload your changes?

I've been working on ELKS for a while, which is entirely based on int13 storage i/o (compatibility being the key motivation), and intend to move in the opposite direction, dma and direct interface access - for performance reasons. It would be interesting to hear some of your viewpoints and experiences. Multitasking and int13 aren't the best of friends.

Good to know that the reconfig sources came to use!

-- M

11. sep. 2022 kl. 21:05 skrev Michael Casadevall @.***>:

 I've managed to get it working on PCem before. I wrote a int 13h driver, and did a bit more patching for floppy disk size to let it run on modern hardware as long as it had a semi-compatible BIOS. Not perfect, and I had to fix a few bugs to get that far, but at least functional to the point I was able to install it to a USB stick (there was deep magic involved)

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[bsdimp]

What's the NC-Special edition? I can also create a directory for contributed drivers. the DEC Rainbow version uses BIOS calls for everything, but suffers from interrupts being disable too long when you do disk and serial at the same time...

[bsdimp]

I've also run Venix/86R in Mame using its DEC Rainbow emulation... but it's kinda slow... and the Rainbow emulation driver is a bit of a hack and not well loved by the greater mame community.

[NCommander]

Unfortunately, I'm travelling for over the next two months, but I'll see if I can dig them out of backups. It's def. possible to do a ATA driver, but the drive ints are hardcoded that it tops out at 32 MiB max drive size, plus a lot of hardcoding in XFER and more. It's not impossible to overcome but its hard ...

[Mellvik]

Thank you both - this activity is encouraging. Maybe we can get some more people interested in the project.

Admittedly it was kind of exciting to finally have a decent emulation working for Venix (PCem was not an option, I've had strong Windows allergies for 20+ years :-) ). My Venix activities have been tied to a physical machine this far (original hard disk and all), run ('remotely') via serial lines because it was too noisy. I raw-copied the entire disk image to the Mac, which is now the HD for the virtual system.

Anyway, I have a lot of BSD and other ported utilities that a friend and I created in the 80s. Together they make the Venix system quite useable. I'll upload them in the next few days.

BTW - the emulation (86box) is not entirely stable yet. There seem to be a timer problem kicking in when I up the clock frequency of the emulates system. Needs more investigation. The symptom is that all processes stop while interrupts continue to work (terminal echo).

—M

12. sep. 2022 kl. 02:13 skrev Michael Casadevall @.***>:

Unfortunately, I'm travelling for over the next two months, but I'll see if I can dig them out of backups. It's def. possible to do a ATA driver, but the drive ints are hardcoded that it tops out at 32 MiB max drive size, plus a lot of hardcoding in XFER and more. It's not impossible to overcome but its hard ...

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[NCommander]

So following up on this, I did dig up some of the VENIX files but my life kinda went sideways. I've got a couple of large folders I can upload but I'd like a chance to go through it since I can't really remember what I did. This was almost a year ago and I never got around to writing it up as well as I would have liked

[bsdimp]

I'm still interested in whatever, and can offer some limited assistance if need be.

[Mellvik]

Great to see some activity again.I submitted a PR with the F77 floppies a while back, maybe you can merge it, Warner?Like I said before, some more work is needed on the emulator issues, but it's encouraging.I have a collection of binaries for Venix2.2/86 almost ready for upload, mostly BSD additions. I discovered that some of the sources have been lost over the years, but most of them are intact. New PRs are coming.--M2. feb. 2023 kl. 21:19 skrev Warner Losh @.***>: I'm still interested in whatever, and can offer some limited assistance if need be.

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