[TUHS] SunOS code?

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Thu Aug 30 00:53:00 AEST 2018


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 08:43:09AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> 
> > Changed the subject line.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm at 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.

The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.  
Everything else seems like a mess to me.



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