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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!hobbes.physics.uiowa.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!deraadt From: deraadt@fsa.ca (Theo de Raadt) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 4.4BSD and SPARC Date: 15 Nov 93 02:11:45 Organization: little lizard city Lines: 35 Message-ID: <DERAADT.93Nov15021145@sun-lamp.agate> References: <1993Nov15.075840.25870@hsacsd.signaal.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu In-reply-to: jacobs@jeep.cars's message of Mon, 15 Nov 1993 07:58:40 GMT In article <1993Nov15.075840.25870@hsacsd.signaal.nl> jacobs@jeep.cars (jacobs private) writes: I recently saw in this newsgroup some references to the 4.4BSD implementation for SPARCstations (sun4/sun4c architectures). Is the (full) distribution of 4.4BSD-SPARC freely available (e.g. ftp)? The sparcstation code by Chris Torek of LBL is part of 4.4BSD. AT&T Unix source license holders can get it from UCB CSRG for a price. This might discourage you... Luckily, Chris also made the machine-dependent parts of his port freely available, and I have been integrating it into NetBSD! Thus far it runs single-usermode and many things work. For example, I can run emacs, vi, du, ls, etc. Yes, dynamically linked executables do work. Can existing (third-party) SunOS 4.1.x applications run on this systeem? Most things should work. There is SunOS 4.1.x binary compatibility code in the kernel which works fairly well. Various things (like added ioctl's and other sunos semantics) still need to be completed, and of course there are certain things which will never work (SystemV RFS system calls, for instance; note that SystemV shared memory, message queues, and semaphores do work though.) (To be quite honest, almost all the binaries I have run thus far on NetBSD/sparc have been SunOS4.1.2 executables, since I have not yet built a standard binary tree. /sbin/init does a few screwy things, but aside from that things that you would expect to work do work.) Sorry, I don't yet know when this code will be ready for public consumption, I don't like to commit to these kinds of things when I also have a real job. <tdr.