[TUHS] MERT aka UNIX/RT

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Sat Aug 10 01:10:01 AEST 2019


Greetings,

I was wondering if there were any early versions of MERT available?

Reading different sources, it appears that MERT was a real time kernel that
used EMT traps to implement unix system calls (from around V4 or V5 given
the timelines) on top of a real time executive (though some sources seem to
imply it was a derivative of V4, most disagree).

I see this in our archives
https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=misc:snippets:mert1 which is quite handy
for discover its (and other early) unix lineages for a talk I'm doing in
about a month. Now that we have sources, I go back and double check the
recollections of things like this to see if version numbers were right,
etc. But I can't do that with MERT at all. I can find the Bell Systems
Technical Journal for Unix that has a brief article on it, but no sources
to double check.

So I thought I'd ask here if we have any MERT artifacts I can look at that
have escaped my casual browsing of the archive. So far I've just found an
email from Kevin Bowling on the topic from last month with no replies. And
a similar thread from 2002, plus pleading from time to time (I can't tell
if Warren or Noel wants it more :).

I guess the same could be said for CB-UNIX and UNIX/TS, though I see a
USDL/CB_Unix directory in the archive I could look at :).

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20190809/83437041/attachment.html>


More information about the TUHS mailing list