Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 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.
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.
Warner