21 Nov
2019
21 Nov
'19
2:07 p.m.
Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> writes:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:33 AM Al Kossow
<aek(a)bitsavers.org> wrote:
For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS. Ran well
enough, but was disk and memory constrained. We had source to much of
the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
that compiling it was a big pain. Something like you had to use a
specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C?? hc command perhaps)
to compile some of the source. gcc had a backend for the ROMP
processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries. I think that
some variation of pcc was the usual compiler. I remember it being
pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS. We used them mostly as X
terminal workstations.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
On 11/5/19 11:59 PM, SPC wrote:
No, that's not true. AOS was basically 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS and it ran on
bare RT hardware. There was source code available to universities, though
as I recall some bits related to memory management were missing and
distributed as object files. I gathered, at the time, this was due to some
obscure intellectual property reasons. People later tried to Port e.g.
4.4BSD to aging RT hardware and found it challenging because the memory
subsystem was so different.
But anyway, there was no hypervisor involved.
- Dan C.
Is it AOS stuff saved and available (including source code)
un some place on the Internet?
It was, and may still be in the afs heirarchy
I'm not going to say where, or how complete what was there is
I also seem to remember it still sat on top of an AIX microkernel
and didn't go down to bare metal.