I yesterday set chatgpt to a coding task. It utterly failed. Its error handling was extensive, but wrong. It didn't know file formats. It couldn't write the code when i told it the format. The structure of the code sucked. The style was worse. I've never had to work so hard for such garbage. I could have knocked it out from scratch faster with higher quality.
PWB Unix was the earliest sources I could find. FreeBSD lists history items for releases going back to the earliest unix release because BSD Unix is derived from AT&T Research Unix and FreeBSD is derived from 4.4BSD...
The tabs file does predate this, and I'll make a note of that (which is what this article is about).
You forgot the following steps:
Profile to see what's the slowest thing
Make a native version of that.
In FreeBSD package builder setup, we also have /bin/sh and a few other heavily used binaries that are native because it shaves hours or days off a package run (itself takes 10 days, even optimized like this).
I know the qemu-bsd-user fork has some hacks for the bsd-user stuff that looks at the binary to be exec'd and does different things based on the target since there's some optimizations you can get out of this if you don't rely on the kernel 100%... Bits of them may even be in my latest patch-set :)
Cool stuff! Do you have a public branch you're working off of? I'd love to follow the progress as I wasn't aware that qemu user emulation for BSD was even a thing.
I didn't get a chance to peruse beyond briefly skimming the source on GH, but I couldn't find any special handling around execve - could you point me in the right direction?
I was looking at bsd-user/syscall.c, whose equivalent in linux-user is where my repo's execve hook lives, if that makes any difference.
FreeBSD has used this same trick for half a dozen years or so to build arm, mips and riscv binaries using fast Intel servers. The FreeBSD build system can build itself to produce binaries for the target (so the compilers run natively) and qemu handles the rest with user-mode emulation via bsd-user (which I happen to be in the process of upstreaming).
It absolutely shared history with Larry Wall's patch.... It took the 2.0 sources and started improving them. I ran across a blurb about this somewhere. Also, the code structure is clearly derivative: variable names, function names, wording of messages.
The question too is whether UNIX is copyrighted due to the pre-berne convention distribution of the system w/o copyright notices... And there's also a question of latches as well should this ever be litigated (I suspect it won't, but I never anticipated the SCO suit, so there you go).
Binary format changes are never fun to go through forwards... This blog entry explains how the 2.11BSD restoration project did it backwards as a step towards creating the boot tapes for the original system...
