Unix for nothing - NetBSD/amiga 1.0

Karl Jeacle
January 1995
Just Amiga Monthly Issue 51
(December 2020 update below)

Some years back, the word on the Amiga Usenet groups was that
legendary Amiga programmer Matt Dillon was going to port 4.4BSD
Unix to the Amiga. This was an incredible undertaking, but if anyone
could do it, Matt Dillon could. For a variety of reasons, the port
never happened, and the dream of a freely available Unix for the
Amiga vanished.

But in early 1993, a community of users around the world on the
Internet starting working together on a version of Unix called
NetBSD. Now, almost two years later, comes NetBSD 1.0.

A brief history of...

I'm not going to give yet another inaccurate history of Unix that
you usually read in articles like this. Instead, I'll just refer
you to an excellent book by Peter H. Salus: 'A Quarter Century of
Unix' (ISBN 0-201-54777-5). This book gives an account of the first
twenty-five years of Unix from the early user group meetings right
through to the lawsuits of recent years.

What I will tell you, though, is that there have been two predominant
'flavours' of Unix available over the years: System V and BSD. The
story goes that AT&T's System V Unix was the domain of industry and
the commercial user, while BSD was the Unix of choice for academia,
no doubt from its roots at the University of California, Berkeley.

Technically, NetBSD is a BSD Net/2 and 4.4BSD-Lite derived system.
A fully functional Unix-like operating system which currently runs
on nine different architectures. NetBSD/amiga is the Amiga port of
NetBSD.

System requirements

NetBSD requires an Amiga with a 68020 or better with some form of
FPU and MMU. The minimal configuration requires 4Mb of RAM and about
65Mb of disk space. To install and use a reasonable environment
with the X window system, at least 8Mb of RAM and about 150Mb of
disk space is required.

All the basic Amiga hardware is supported including the floppy
drive, parallel port, serial port, mouse, ECS, and AGA. A4000 IDE
is supported along with most SCSI host adaptors such those by
Commodore, GVP, 12 Guage, IVS, Wordsync, Magnum, Warp Engine and
Zeus. A2024, Retina Z2 and Retina Z3 are the only graphics cards
supported. A2065 and Hydra ethernet cards are recognised.

The above describes what is 'officially' available or indeed what
is supported by release 1.0 of NetBSD/amiga. But work on many other
cards and devices is underway and in many cases is already complete,
just not integrated into the NetBSD source tree. This includes
support for A1200 IDE, Fastlane SCSI, Multiface-III Serial, and
Cirrus Logic 5426 based video cards such as the Picasso-II, Spectrum
and Piccolo. There is also work on supporting PC cards by using the
Goldengate-II card. In fact, there are already a number of NetBSD/amiga
users using NE1000 and NE2000 ethernet cards designed for PCs.

Installation

The compressed NetBSD/amiga distribution (excluding sources) isn't
too far short of 20Mb. Getting this onto your system is obviously
going to be a big problem unless you have a tape drive or CDROM.
Of course, floppies will work if you have the patience - but finding
someone willing to supply you with a version on floppies could be
difficult!

The NetBSD distribution contains a 'Generic' kernel with support
for all supported Amiga hardware, a bootstrap program to boot that
kernel, and a boot floppy with a minimal BSD root filesystem.

The filesystem on the boot floppy is configured to allow you to
make a SLIP connection, configure an ethernet, mount an NFS disk,
start an FTP session, read from a SCSI tape drive or simply mount
and read an AmigaDOS partition. This enables you to gain access to
the NetBSD distribution sets. These sets can then be unpacked one
by one onto your hard disk.

The NetBSD binary distribution comes in the following sets:

base10  The NetBSD/amiga 1.0 base binary distribution. This must be
      installed. Contains base utilities to bring the system up.
      Include shared library support.
      [ 7M gzipped, 19M uncompressed ]

comp10  The NetBSD/amiga Compiler tools. C, C++ and Fortran compilers,
      linker, system include files, system libraries, and manual
      pages for these utilities in addition to system call and library
      manual pages.
      [ 4M gzipped, 12M uncompressed ]

etc10   All the system configuration files which reside in /etc.
      [ 50K gzipped, 280K uncompressed ]

games10 The usual bunch of simple games you find on Unix systems.
      [ 1M gzipped, 3M uncompressed ]

man10   Manuals for the binaries and other software contained in the base
      set. All other man pages are included with their respective binaries.
      [ 730K gzipped, 3M uncompressed ]

misc10  System dictionaries, typesettable document set, and man pages for
      some other NetBSD architectures.
      [ 2M gzipped, 6M uncompressed ]

text10  Text processing tools including groff, and related programs.
      [ 784K gzipped, 3M uncompressed ]

A full complement of source distribution sets is also available.

Features

Almost everything you'd expect to find in a BSD derived system like
SunOS or Ultrix is included with NetBSD. Configuring and administering
the system is similar, as is porting applications.

A major advantage of running NetBSD is its networking software. Why
run AmiTCP when you can run the original software? An Amiga based
NetBSD system can perform just about any Internet related task
imaginable.

Another feature which some NetBSD/amiga users may find useful is
its binary compatibility with the sun3 architecture. NetBSD can run
SunOS binaries which ran on early Motorola 680x0 based Sun workstations.

As can be seen from the binary distribution sets listed above,
NetBSD is pretty complete. However, lots of popular applications
from the Unix world either have been ported or will port without
too much trouble to NetBSD. Some ready-to-run applications I've
FTP'd include xv, Mosaic, fvwm, top and lha.

It is important to note that NetBSD is a complete operating system,
and hence replaces AmigaOS. Both systems can coexist on one hard
disk, and files can be shared, but only one system at a time can
be running. I suppose you could argue that NetBSD wasn't very system
friendly, as it completely takes over the system... :-)

The competition

MINIX was created by Professor Andrew S. Tannenbaum of the Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam as a teaching aid for students taking his
course in operating systems. The version distributed by Prentice-Hall
only supports 68000 and floppy based systems. Patches for CBM SCSI
and 68020/030 support must be acquired elsewhere. There is no support
for the 68040 or IDE drives. See my article on MINIX in the October
1992 CUGI Newsletter.

Commodore's Amiga Unix (AMIX) was the first commercially available
full implementation of System V Release 4 Unix. While a fine product,
it was never a commercial success and was dropped by Commodore some
time ago. Major disadvantages include no 68040 support and the fact
that it is obviously no longer supported.

Linux is probably the most successful of the freeware Unix
implementations on Intel platforms. Originally designed to make
exclusive use of 80x86 features, it has been a difficult task to
get a Motorola 680x0 port up and running. However, some dedicated
programmers have done just that, and Motorola versions (including
one for the Amiga) are available. Linux on Motorola is progressing
rapidly, but is still probably about one year behind the NetBSD
Motorola effort. Linux on Intel is ahead of both.

AmiNIX and ANIX are both very new on the scene, with little known
about either. Both are the work of individual programmers, and while
promising great things, probably fall a good deal short of what's
currently available.

Where to find it

The 'Meeting Pearls Vol.1' CD had a copy of NetBSD 0.9, but this
release is now long out of date. At the time of writing, NetBSD 1.0
has just been released, so by the time you read this, a number of
CDs will probably be available containing the full 1.0 release.
'Meeting Pearls Vol.2' promises to have a full copy of the NetBSD/amiga
1.0 distribution.

Although 1.0 has been released, development is still under way with
much work being carried out on support for as many third-party cards
as possible. So, it is likely that in addition to the stock 1.0
distribution you will receive kernels or sources with support for
a wider range of Amiga equipment.

If you're lucky enough to have Internet access, you can find the
latest version of NetBSD/amiga at:

ftp://ftp.uni-regensburg.de/pub/NetBSD-Amiga/

You could also try reading the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.amiga for
general discussion on Unix implementations for the Amiga.

Conclusion

Running a prerelease of NetBSD on my Amiga 4000/040 with Picasso-II,
I was impressed. An X display of 1152x900 in 256 colours was as
usable as any X terminal or low-end Unix workstation. Of course,
you're not going to get DEC Alpha performance on an Amiga, so
applications will run slower, but for most day-to-day tasks,
performance is more than acceptable.

There's not much more I can say. It's BSD Unix for the Amiga. And
it's free.

http://www.jeacle.ie/pub/articles/netbsd/desktop.gif


NetBSD/amiga 9.1
December 2020

It's 25 years later and I've decided to try NetBSD on the Amiga
again. Here are some observations and notes on a few things I had
to do along the way.

NetBSD is heavier now. System requirements are 24MB of RAM and a
few hundred MB of disk space. Lots more RAM if you want to run X11.
While 1.0 was very usable and almost snappy on my 25MHz 68040 with
16MB of RAM, 9.1 is very slow on my 40MHz 68040 with 128MB of RAM.
It works but everything takes time. Presumably a 68060 would ease
the pain slightly.

Installation is well documented. In summary, create your partitions
using HDToolBox, use xstreamtodev in AmigaOS to write a miniroot
filesystem to the swap partition and then reboot into that swap
partition to run the installer.

I have a Hydra AmigaNet ethernet card and a local NFS server so I
was able to download the distribution sets onto my local server and
do the NFS install. I originally tried to install using FTP direct
from the NetBSD FTP server but had some problems with FTP sessions
timing out during the install.

The first boot takes a long time. You would be mistaken for thinking
the system had crashed as building font caches and system databases
for the first time is slow. When the login prompt appears, even
logging in is slow. I realised that this was partly down to man
page databases being built in the background and it's possible to
turn this off.

First thing to do on logging in was to set the time correctly with
ntpdate, set a root password and then create a user with something
like:

# mkdir /home
# useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/csh -c "Karl Jeacle" kj
# passwd kj

To enable remote logins, use "service sshd onestart". The first
time this was run took more than an hour to create the host ssh
keys. If you can live with telnet, just edit /etc/inetd.conf,
uncomment the telnet line and "service inetd restart".

On trying to log in remotely, however, you will get an error
complaining that all available ports are in use or no ptys are
available. Fix this by making some more ptys:

# cd /dev
# ./MAKEDEV pty0

If you want to add packages, you can see a list of what's available
at http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amiga/9.1/All/

I installed the tcsh package using:

# PKG_PATH="http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r|cut -f '1 2' -d.)/All/"
# export PKG_PATH
# pkg_add tcsh

Finally, I added the following lines to /etc/rc.conf to set the
time, start ssh, disable postfix and stop the background man database
from building at boot:

sshd=YES
postfix=NO
makemandb=NO
ntpdate=YES
ntpdate_flags="-b -s"
ntpdate_hosts="w.x.y.z"

X11

In older versions of NetBSD there were several different Amiga-specific
X11 servers to choose from. You installed a server based on what
kind of graphics chipset you had.

In recent versions of NetBSD, these are no longer used and instead
there is a single Xorg binary that uses NetBSD's wscons (Workstation
Console) framework. Xorg uses a driver called wsfb, and wsfb, in
turn, uses a driver for your specific hardware.

Unfortunately, there is no wsfb driver for the native Amiga chipset
so X11 is not possible on a stock Amiga, but there is support for
some RTG cards. CyberVision, Picasso, Piccolo, Spectrum, Domino,
Merlin and oMnibus cards can all work with wsfb. There is also a
working ZZ9000 driver that will hopefully make it into the next
release.

When you install NetBSD, the default kernel does not support running
X11 on the Amiga. You need to boot using the netbsd-WSCONS kernel.
This is available on the FTP site along with the distribution sets
and AmigaOS binaries. Boot it from the Amiga using loadbsd or copy
it into the root directory on NetBSD and then specify it at the
boot prompt on starting NetBSD.

A small config file is required. Place the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Keyboard0"
  Driver "kbd"
  Option "Protocol" "wskbd"
  Option "Device" "/dev/wskbd0"
EndSection

Check dmesg output to see where you graphic card appears. Cybervision
64 is /dev/grf5. To see available screen modes, use "grfconfig
/dev/grf5". To load in new modes, create a file such as /etc/gfxmodes
with the following lines and then add something like "grfconfig
/dev/grf5 /etc/gfxmodes" to your rc.local. (Thanks to Alain Runa
for this advice.)

c 40000000 800 600 4 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
1 40000000 800 600 8 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
2 40000000 800 600 16 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
3 40000000 800 600 24 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
4 40000000 800 600 32 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
5 65000000 1024 768 8 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync
6 65000000 1024 768 16 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync
7 108000000 1280 1014 8 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync
8 122000000 1400 1050 8 1400 1488 1640 1880 1050 1052 1064 1082 +hsync +vsync

At this point, a simple "startx" should launch X11 for you.

Conclusion

All of these years later, it's really quite amazing that running
NetBSD on the Amiga is possible at all. There is a small team of
volunteers working on the NetBSD/amiga port keeping it alive. Hats
off to them for all of their hard work over the years.

http://www.jeacle.ie/pub/articles/netbsd/zz9k.png

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