Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

[Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, May 2, 2022, 2:16 PM Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr> wrote:

> > The RT 4.3 port was called AOS (for the, "Academic Operating System"). It
> > was mostly Tahoe with NFS and came with most of the sources, but some
> bits
> > were distributed only as object code: I believe some of the MM bits?
> > Perhaps the MMU code? I vaguely recall this being one of the things
> people
> > had a hard time with when trying to port Reno and 4.4 to the RT.
>
> What was delivered as binary was the Advanced Floating-Point Accelerator
> microcode.


Thanks. My memory of all of this is decaying over time. I'd forgotten about
the AFPA; I believe our RTs either had a 68881 or 68882, but it's been so
long the details are fuzzy: I definitely remember a Motorola FPU, but no
longer remember the model.

At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
> except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
> was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).


This happened outside of IBM, didn't it? What prevented the rest of the VM
code being ported?

> The port was fairly faithful; the C compiler was a bit strange "High C" or
> > "Hi C", bit GCC was available after a while, but had some bug and could
> not
> > compile the kernel.
>
> The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
> kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
> relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
> could be used to build a working kernel.
>

I vaguely remember that happening, but by then we had retired the RTs.

I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again
the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference
in the man page?

        - Dan C.

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