ooh, there's an idea for new project...

I also have a soft spot for the old PDP11 architecture and aesthetics, and like the idea of an emulator sitting behind an 11/70 front panel, but I havn't been able to decide what software to run on it...

Unix ran quite nicely on an 11/70 back in the late 70s, but I doubt you would squeeze much more than the boot loader of a modern bloated system onto one.... And a Unix image from that era would probably be a little limited. (I don't really have enough history with RT11/RSTS to want to use them). 

So the question is... is plan9 still lean and mean enough to fit onto a machine with a 64K address space? Doing a port would certainly provide plenty of opportunity to tinker with the lights and switches on front panel, and if it the port was initially limited to being a CPU server, there would be no need to worry about displays and mass storage.... just the compiler back end and low level kernel support.

Has anyone already looked at that? I expect it would be a fun, educational and nostalgic exercise, but of course not of much practical use...

Regards,
DigbyT

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 at 00:23, Brian L. Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:
Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 12:11 AM Mayuresh Kathe <mayuresh@kathe.in> wrote:
> man, i experienced such heavy negativity towards my efforts to build ...
>
> the idea was to have a 64-bit linux kernel with the advantages of
> plan9port (small and elegantly designed+developed tools).

Mayuresh,
To echo what others have said, don't let the negativity
itself affect your work.  Consider only the technical points
that have been raised.  To the extent that you evaluate
them and consider them relevant to your objectives, factor
them into your work.

It really doesn't matter if anyone else ever cares about
or uses your work.  If you learn from it, get intellectual
satisfaction from it, and it's useful to you, then it's worth
doing.  If others can benefit too, great, but lack of interest
on the part of others is not a good reason for lack of
initiative on your part.  As far as I can tell, I'm the only
one using a file system I developed.  Sure, in some ways
I would like if everyone thought it was as great as I do,
but just because they don't doesn't stop me from benefitting
from it.

As for the specifics of your project, I personally don't think
I'd be all that interested in the results.  As much as I like
the elegance and simplicty of the implementation of the
Plan 9 user-land, much of the beauty of the system comes
from the simplicity and elegance of the kernel.  So if I
were using the Plan 9 user-land on top of the LInux kernel,
I wouldn't feel the same sense of beauty, intellectual satisfaction,
and connection to the original developers as I do running
the same user-land on the Plan 9 kernel.  But just because
I wouldn't be interested is no reason to stop your research.
Just be sure to study the similar efforts that have come
before and that have been mentioned here.  What did
they accomplish?  Did they go wrong somewhere?  Can
you get to that goal avoiding those mistakes?  If nothing
else, the whole experience will almost certainly give you
a greater appreciation for the Plan 9 kernel.

Just a couple of thoughts from an old-timer who misses
the days of working on PDP-11s.

BLS