[TUHS] [pups] gcc-3.4.6 and old unix

[root@dynamite.narpes.com (Charlie ROOT)]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 patv at monmouth.com wrote:

> If this helps at all, I've been working (very, very slowly) on a port of
> v32 to Intel platforms.  At first I used gcc for some kernel work, but
> quickly realized that it would be overwhelming to the final v7 system. 

If you're interested in running V7 on x86, you should check out
the 286-port on the TUHS FTP site, as it was fully operational 
until the author, according to his report, messed up the file 
system code.

For a 32-bit Unix, the Quasijarus project would be better
starting point, as it is more seasoned as a 32-bit operating
system.  The project project was started by Michael Sokolov, with
the primary goal of extending 4.3BSD-Tahoe to run on newer VAX
hardware.  You can find the source, as well as the mailing list,
from the web page at:  http://ifctfvax.harhan.org/Quasijarus/

Because NetBSD and especially GCC have long since outgrown all
but the most powerful VAX hardware, including my VAXstation
4000-60, I've been looking into the possibility of getting
Quasijarus to run on the machine - very slowly, of course.
I've only managed to hack the NetBSD kernel into running the
binaries properly - it should support 32V-ones as well, for
that matter.

I'm also interested in 386-ports of the classical Unix utilities,
but my kernel-side focus is on a brand new, non-portable kernel
written in assembly language for compactness and flexibility of
running, examining and debugging code that excessively picky
operating systems choke at - e.g. real- and kernel-mode code.

> Since I don't want to do the work twice, I looked for a different compiler
> suite.  I switched to the ACK compiler suite and just finished the WinXP
> cross compiler work.  It has a pdp11 back end, which I have yet to try,
> that may be useful.
> 
> It isn't gcc, but ir does do ANSI C and the i386 assembler seems to be
> pretty complete.  Let me know if there's any interest and I'll put it up
> on my site for download.

Did you make other improvements than XP cross-compilation?

-aw