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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:13118 comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt:3270 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swiss.ans.net!news.ans.net!roger From: roger@ans.net (Roger Florkowski) Subject: Re: HELP I need info on net/free BSD for IBM RT's Sender: news@ans.net (News Administrator) Message-ID: <1994Sep13.154833.122677@ans.net> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 1994 15:48:33 GMT References: <34m2do$amh@debris.cosmic.com> <34pnsi$hvf@spruce.cic.net> <34qlfp$kh6@father.ludd.luth.se> Organization: Advanced Network & Services - Elmsford, NY Lines: 59 In article <34qlfp$kh6@father.ludd.luth.se> ragge@father.ludd.luth.se (Anders Magnusson) writes: >In <34pnsi$hvf@spruce.cic.net> pauls@locust.cic.net (Paul Southworth) writes: > >>In article <34m2do$amh@debris.cosmic.com>, >>Marc Spitzer <marc@debris.cosmic.com> wrote: >>>I need information on Net-BSD and/or Free-BSD for the IBM RT's my school has >>>10 of these and the are still in the boxs the came in from IBM. This is >>>because they do not have an OS for them to run. Please help these are the >>>only unix workstations on campus except for one lonely Sun. And if I rember >>>right I read about a port of one of the bsd's to the RT. > >>Your operating systems choices (to my knowledge) for the RT consist of >>AIX and AOS4. AIX is not BSD-based; AOS is. However, I don't believe that >>AOS was ever available outside of the academic/research community. Perhaps >>someone else can verify that since I haven't used an RT in a while. >>There is a small dedicated (crazed?) following of the RT -- you may >>elicit their attention by posting on comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt. > >In fact there _is_ an real 4.3 BSD port for RT machines. IBM had >an department working on it for RT machines, but they moved into the >AOS environment instead, and noone knows who is responsible for that >port now. Yep, it was an straightforward port of original 4.3BSD release, >it even said 4.3 BSD UNIX at the login prompt :) Well, as far as I know, AOS was as real of a BSD-4.3 port that ever came out of IBM. On top of BSD-4.3, interesting things like Sun-NFS and AFS support were added. BSD-4.3-RENO was ported to the RT. That was a "pure" port, where only the AOS device drivers were dropped on top of the RENO tape. BSD-4.4 (almost) was ported to the RT. It retained the kernel VM, proc handling code, and filesystem code from the RENO port. Otherwise, it was 100% BSD-4.4. Of course (and unfortunately) none of these are publicly available. But the important point is that it *IS* possible. Which leads me to: >>Now there *should* be a port of NetBSD to the RT, but it's not on their >>porting list as of yet. If anyone's interested in doing it I will try >>to get them a machine. > >I have an friend here who has an RT machine, and has been talking about >trying to make an NetBSD port, but he lacks some hardware specs on >his machine. I've said before, this *should* be very doable (to make a publicly available version, based on NetBSD, or whatever). Especially if you are willing to ignore a bunch of the IBM adapters and go with generic PC adapters instead. (example: ignore the IBM display adapters altogether, and use an SVGA display instead). Then you can re-use much of the x86 code in NetBSD. But you'll still need many late nights with the TECH docs, since none of the low-level code was ever publicly released by IBM. Roger. -- Roger Florkowski - Advanced Network & Services, Inc. - roger@ans.net