Most things in the VENIX emulator are working

SUCCESS

So I got tired of the terrible progress I was making chasing down issues. I thought if I could just create a simple program and get that working, I'd have much better luck.

So I wrote a simple K&R style C program:

int a=123;
int b;
extern char *etext, *edata, *end;
main() {
int c;
printf("CS: %x DS: %x ES: %x SS: %x\n", getcs(), getds(), getes(), getss());
printf("&data = %x &bss = %x &stack = %x\n", &a, &b, &c);
printf("etext = %x edata = %x end = %x\n", &etext, &edata, &end);
}

which printed the segment addresses and then locations of the segments.

and I ran it on my old Rainbow running Venix.

I made some interesting discoveries. First, that there are two kinds of stacks (low and high) in addition to there being two kinds of binary (OMAGIC and NMAGIC). So my loader was all wrong. Next, I discovered I needed to jump to a_entry, not 0, to make low stack binaries work (all the ones I'd been testing so far were low stack, but somehow mostly worked when the stack and text segments were swapped).

Armed with this knowledge, I built 4 binaries (no flags, -z, -i, -i -z) to test all 4 cases. The -z ones worked (yea!) while the non-z ones didn't. My loader was right in this case, but I was returning EFAULT for all the writes. Why? Because I had a check in there to make sure the address was between 0 and brk. High stack binaries also have a valid area from sp() to 0xffff. When I added that change, all 4 test programs worked.

Of course, getting them from the Rainbow to the server was a challenge. The key to remember here is that you needed to use 'set line /dev/com1.m' on the rainbow so that kermit would on login port. I also had to down-clock to 2400 baud to get it reliable.

So, I started testing a lot of programs that failed to work before. Sort(1) is now working. ls isn't, but comes closer (it tries really hard to interpret a modern FreeBSD dirent as a v7 one and that's not so good, but that's fixable). nm is still giving me problems, for reasons unknown. I have enough things working, though, that I can start to try out as, ld and friends. Maybe even cc (though I'd need to get both fork and signals working for that driver program). /bin/sh fails missing dup() (and likely a bunch of others).

So excellent progress in the last few days.