[COFF] [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 01:50:12PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 09:11:47AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much
> > > less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2
> > > for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them.  The user-space was
> > > mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great
> > > deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM
> > > called TCF - the transparent computing facility.  It was very cool you
> > > could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either
> > > ISA.   It has been well discussed in this forum, previously.
> > 
> > It's really a shame that TCF didn't get more widespread usage/traction.
> > That's exactly what BitMover wanted to do, I wanted to scale small cheap
> > SMPs in a cluster with a TCF layer on it.  I gave some talks about it,
> > it obviously went nowhere but might have if we had TCF as a starting
> > point.  TCF was cool.
> 
> (Moving this to COFF...)
> 
> Out of curiousity, how was TCF different or similar to Mosix?

The thing I remember most about TCF is that it virtualized struct
proc, so process pointers were like vnodes and you could move a
process to a different node in the cluster and ps still saw it
and could dig info out of the remote kernel.