I had a bizarre side project to re-host old GCC 1.x on Windows so I could cross compile early Linux kernels (it actually works too!)

I was going down the path of cross compiling 386BSD when I ran into the boot block hell of it being really inconvenient to stage any kernel in a way to boot test.

Anyway PCC is more or less alive these days, and supports both i386 and AMDx64. I'd suppose cross compiling from that may be doable. I'd shoved Tahoe through GCC 1.42 for the i386, and most of the C actually built. Of course no assembly, no boot/stand and I gave up just as quickly as the low stuff is well over my head. But my point being that it ought to be something that could be done, there was even that Quasijarous VAX which was Tahoe with POSIX removed.....

On February 8, 2017 10:10:24 PM GMT+08:00, Jacob Goense <dugo@xs4all.nl> wrote:
On 2017-02-08 14:10, jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com wrote:
 After I had pasted a bunch of 386BSD pl0.24 + a CVS export of 0.8 I
 did get a booting system.

I remember that Victor Frankenstein ;) Proved how close these 2 were.

 Then I found an old ftp site that had 0.8
 I made a mirror of it, then it disappeared.

Very glad that piece of history got unearthed.

 I did some minor work on installing it on Bochs years ago, and VMware,
 from what I recall, NetBSD 1.0/1.1 can boot 386BSD’s kernel, while
 the 386BSD boot diskette didn’t work under emulation, NetBSD’s
 does, and I used that to kickstart an installation.  Same with the
 boot blocks on the harddisk image.

386BSD is now bootable in Bochs, with very, very specific settings.
One that works at:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dugoh/tobochs/master/bochsrc

Back then it required a patch against bochs too as the boot blocks
do some truly weird stuff with the PIC (polling OCW3?), something
most emulators don't implement or even barf on.

These 2 little marvels didn't have much bloat, but the Bostification
had already set in. My idea of a true diet x86 UNIX system would be
a report of Tahoe without resorting to gcc/gas or anything else that
smells like RMS.

--
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