2 May
2022
2 May
'22
8:14 p.m.
The RT 4.3 port was called AOS (for the,
"Academic Operating System"). It
was mostly Tahoe with NFS and came with most of the sources, but some bits
were distributed only as object code: I believe some of the MM bits?
Perhaps the MMU code? I vaguely recall this being one of the things people
had a hard time with when trying to port Reno and 4.4 to the RT.
What was delivered as binary was the Advanced Floating-Point Accelerator
microcode.
At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).
The port was fairly faithful; the C compiler was a bit
strange "High C" or
"Hi C", bit GCC was available after a while, but had some bug and could not
compile the kernel.
The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
could be used to build a working kernel.
Miod