2 May
2006
2 May
'06
10:52 p.m.
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 patv(a)monmouth.com wrote:
If this helps at all, I've been working (very,
very slowly) on a port of
v32 to Intel platforms. At first I used gcc for some kernel work, but
quickly realized that it would be overwhelming to the final v7 system.
If you're interested in running V7 on x86, you should check out
the 286-port on the TUHS FTP site, as it was fully operational
until the author, according to his report, messed up the file
system code.
For a 32-bit Unix, the Quasijarus project would be better
starting point, as it is more seasoned as a 32-bit operating
system. The project project was started by Michael Sokolov, with
the primary goal of extending 4.3BSD-Tahoe to run on newer VAX
hardware. You can find the source, as well as the mailing list,
from the web page at: http://ifctfvax.harhan.org/Quasijarus/
Because NetBSD and especially GCC have long since outgrown all
but the most powerful VAX hardware, including my VAXstation
4000-60, I've been looking into the possibility of getting
Quasijarus to run on the machine - very slowly, of course.
I've only managed to hack the NetBSD kernel into running the
binaries properly - it should support 32V-ones as well, for
that matter.
I'm also interested in 386-ports of the classical Unix utilities,
but my kernel-side focus is on a brand new, non-portable kernel
written in assembly language for compactness and flexibility of
running, examining and debugging code that excessively picky
operating systems choke at - e.g. real- and kernel-mode code.
Since I don't want to do the work twice, I looked
for a different compiler
suite. I switched to the ACK compiler suite and just finished the WinXP
cross compiler work. It has a pdp11 back end, which I have yet to try,
that may be useful.
It isn't gcc, but ir does do ANSI C and the i386 assembler seems to be
pretty complete. Let me know if there's any interest and I'll put it up
on my site for download.
Did you make other improvements than XP cross-compilation?
-aw