Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 14:06:58 +0930 (CST) From: Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: viren@rstcorp.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, newton@dotat.org Subject: Re: SVR4 emulation? Message-ID: <199810020436.OAA24871@atdot.dotat.org> In-Reply-To: <199810011952.MAA00964@dingo.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Oct 1, 98 12:52:21 pm
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Mike Smith wrote: > > I just followed a link on slashdot.org to someone's work on SVR4 > > emulation for FreeBSD. It is at > > ftp://slash.dotat.org/pub/freebsd-svr4/ > > Has anyone tried this out? Are there any plans for it to be > > incorporated in FreeBSD? A couple of people have tried it as far as I can tell, but I've had precious little feedback. Reading anguished requests for beta testers in -hackers leads me to believe that that state of affairs is in no way unusual for kernel-related work :-( > It was just a bit too late for 3.0, but it will be incorporated shortly > therafter. > > > Tought I'd ask before trying it out myself. > > We'd love to hear your results; please keep us informed. Indeed. Please give it a try and let me know how you go with it. It isn't complete, by any means, but I've had mixed amounts of success with relatively complicated applications. Most of the software on the Solaris 2.5.1 CD-ROM seems to work ok, anyway. Things which aren't done include: - Light-Weight Processes, otherwise known as kernel threads (duh!) - Interfacing BSD's emulation of SysV shared memory to SysVR4 syscalls - I think there's still a small bug in sigreturn() which might explain why Netscape doesn't work and Solaris vi dumps core (it never used to dump core until I reimplemented sendsig/sigreturn, so the problem has to be in there somewhere). - various other things on a to-do list on the webpage. Since this is going to -chat I guess it'd make sense to explain why we'd want SysVR4: The (abortive?) UltraSPARC port and the somewhat more successful Alpha port have had the beneficial side-effect of getting people to work on making FreeBSD 64-bit clean, placing us in a good position for a Merced port if Merced ever gets released. SysV vendors such as Sun, Silicon Graphics, SCO and HP have announced plans to port Solaris, IRIX, OpenServer and HP-UX to Merced. Now -- If we run on Merced and can run Merced SysVR4 executables, that means we'll be able to run programs written for Solaris, IRIX, OpenServer and HP-UX. ... which is rather more comprehensive than, "Yeah, we can run most Linux code, but Oracle still doesn't work." At the moment, of course, I'm saying, "Yeah, we can run most Solaris and some SCO code, but Oracle still doesn't work," so maybe we haven't made much headway yet :-) Personally I think Merced is a Microsoft plot: Distract all the UNIX vendors by making them rush around porting their OSs to a processor that'll never be released while NT powers ahead on Pentium descendants :-) But just in case I'm wrong I've done the SysVR4 stuff. There's a web page for the project at http://slash.dotat.org/~newton/freebsd-svr4 (essentially a HTMLized version of the README file, 'cept a bit more up-to-date). Download it, join the mailing list, try it out with a Solaris or SCO CD, and tell us what you think. Thanks, - mark -------------------------------------------------------------------- I tried an internal modem, newton@atdot.dotat.org but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton ----- Voice: +61-4-1958-3414 ------------- Fax: +61-8-83034403 ----- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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