2 Apr
2021
2 Apr
'21
5:50 p.m.
On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 09:11:47AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
(Moving this to COFF...)
Out of curiousity, how was TCF different or similar to Mosix?
- Ted
Long before
Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much
less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2
for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was
mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great
deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM
called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you
could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either
ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously.
It's really a shame that TCF didn't get more widespread usage/traction.
That's exactly what BitMover wanted to do, I wanted to scale small cheap
SMPs in a cluster with a TCF layer on it. I gave some talks about it,
it obviously went nowhere but might have if we had TCF as a starting
point. TCF was cool.