Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1783 bytes --]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:43 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>

Also, a huge difference is that there's *NO* MP support for SunOS.
Solbourne produced OS/MP which was SunOS with fine-grained locking added (I
forget the degree to which it was, but IIRC, there were 'funnels' that used
locks around the different subsystems (so not one big giant lock), not
fine-grained in the sense we use it today. *THAT* source is harder to find
online...

Warner

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2537 bytes --]