[TUHS] Other operating systems on the PDP-11
Warren Toomey
wkt at minnie.tuhs.org
Mon Jul 8 13:43:51 AEST 2002
In article by Greg 'groggy' Lehey:
> Has anyone successfully gotten, say, NetBSD, or anything along the lines of the
> > 4.4 series to run on a PDP-11?
>
> The big issue is address space. It's difficult enough shoehorning
> 2.11BSD onto the PDP-11. It's well-nigh impossible to retrofit 32 bit
> operating systems. But Steven M. Schulz will doubtless give you a
> better explanation.
> Greg
More specifically, the issue is data space. Using overlays, you can
have a process with more than 64Kbytes of instruction space on a PDP-11,
but the maximum data space that a process can have is 64Kbytes.
The kernel is in a similar situation, but with some PDP-11 models
there is kernel mode and supervisor mode, giving you two separate
64Kbytes instruction + 64Kbytes data address spaces (and overlays
to increase the I space).
I can't see Linux fitting into 128K of data space, and GCC is definitely
out of the question. Besides, 2.11BSD already looks pretty close to 4BSD :-)
Warren
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