29 Aug
2018
29 Aug
'18
8:53 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 08:43:09AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM
<arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
it would be far from a drop-in. So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.