23 Feb
2023
23 Feb
'23
2:44 a.m.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes:
On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 01:04:37PM -0700, Warner Losh
wrote:
There may have been other parallel efforts in one form or the other. I
know that there existed a patch to SunOS 4.1.3 that updated the network
stack to a newer version from Berkeley that gained a couple of new
features over the one Sun delivered. The patch was source code, but it
was possible with this patch to apply it to a binary copy of SunOS and
recompile / compile a new kernel that had the new stack in it, that is,
you didn't need the full source to the kernel. It was a long time ago
and I don't remember the details exactly, but I did use it on a file /
build / NIS server we had in the department at AT&T/Lucent where I was
at. My point mostly being that hacking on SunOS 4.x appears to have
happened here and there. It certainly would have been nice to have a
open source SunOS 4.x around although the userland may have presented
its own trouble.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
On Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:50 AM Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There is SunOS as in everything shipped, kernel and userspace, and there
is the kernel. So far as I remember, the i386 stuff was never integrated
into the source tree that Sun shipped from. There was the roadrunner
stuff but I don't think that ever made it in to the official tree. If
it did, nobody paid attention to it. All people cared about at the
time as SPARC and I don't think there was any outsourced hacking for
SPARC, that was all in house.
The networking stack in SunOS 4.x was BSD derived. You might be thinking
of Solaris, that took the Lachman STREAMS stack but that was 5.x, not
4.x.
As the only guy, that I'm aware of, who took all the encumbered stuff
out of the kernel, put back the BSD tty drivers and a few other small
things that resulted in a kernel that we could freely open source,
I beg to differ with:
> Bits of the
> network stack as well. It was hopeless to try to open source. There was a
> lot of bits
> and pieces that Sun had done with contracts that were, at best, ambiguous
> for
> what to do should they want to open source it. Has anyone tried talking to anyone at Oracle
about possibly getting
the SunOS code released under an open source license? There can't be
any commercial value left in it.
SunOS 4 has a lot of encumbered code in it, especially for i386 drivers.