From: Chris G. Demetriou (cgd@agate.berkeley.edu)
Subject: The Status of 386bsd 0.1 (*ANSWER*)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Date: 1992-06-11 13:11:16 PST

/* I told Bill Jolitz a few days ago that I'd post something about 0.1,
 * as he doesn't really have the time... I barely do too, but i've
 * seen enough discussions about FP emulation to make me puke, and
 * enough requests about 0.1 that i'm finally going to post this...
 *

0.1

Status:
	Being beta-tested.  Trying to kill all the stoopidbugs.
	(Still not perfect, has a few *really* annoying bugs, some
	of which have real impact on continued operation.  Hopefully
	most, if not all of these, will be gone by the release.)

	Bill had wanted to get 0.1 out last Friday.  As you can tell,
	it didn't quite make it.  There are about 6-8 people betatesting
	it right now.  I have some diffs i want to get to him before
	it's released.

New/fun/fixed features:

* A working init.  (yeah, when i got it down on the hard drive, it
	actually booted multiuser the first time... 8-)

* Floating point emulation.  That's right, "We don't need no stinkin'
	math chips!"  (The code that i've seen was taken from Linux...)

* I've not seen a spontaneous vm_fault in ages.

* There are so many bug fixes it's unbelievable.

* UUCP, and RCS.  They're mucho useful...

I could go on, for a long time, but by now you get the picture.
I'm really happy with what i've seen so far.


Bugs as of what i have:

* under heavy load (i.e. much paging/swapping), things tend to sleep
	on vm pages, and never be awakened.  this is evil.

* the com port driver didn't work (it was unchanged from the original).
	I'm trying to get Bill to include the one modified by
	Daniel Muntz, then rivers@ponds.uucp... (I'm also hacking
	SunOS-style bidirectional ports into it...)

* there's a bug with the tty status character on *my* machine
	which can crash the machine if you hold it down for a screen
	and a half, and/or hit it during the "right part" of a disk
	access.

* general annoying things:
	* permissions on some things wrong

	* no DES in libc (and therefore, unencrypted passwords -- Bill
	  doesn't want to distribute crypt.c, for what sound like good
	  reasons to me... i'll be providing him and/or the net with a
	  set of unstructions to fix that...).

	* things like the nfs daemons starting automatically, and
	  then dumping core in /, if NFS is not compiled into the
	  kernel.  (i'm providing a fix for this, which also adds
	  kernel version-numbering back into the system, as well as
	  SunOS-style kernel identification...  hopefully this will
	  be incorporated as well...)

and now the answer to the question you've all been asking:

WHEN?

well, that's a bit tougher.  By all indications, it should have been
out *months* ago, and *I* actually thought that it was going to make
it out over the last weekend...

However, there are a number of things to fix before it gets released.

I feel safe saying that it'll be out within 2 weeks.
(read that as:  If it's not out within 2 weeks, i'm going to be really
annoyed, because i was told when i got this beta that 0.1 would be
out *REALLY* soon... and that was a week ago... 8-)


Hope that helps some of you out...

Chris
cgd@agate.berkeley.edu