Re: SunOS 4.1.3 or OS/MP?

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010, Artyom Tarasenko wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Craig Dewick <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Sep 2010, Artyom Tarasenko wrote:
>>
>>> Does anyone have a spare SunOS 4.1.3 or OS/MP install disk/tape/image ?
>>> It would help improving the sparc (sun4m) emulation under qemu...
>>
>> At some point I did have a CD with OS/MP on it from the time when I did have
>> my Kbus 5/502 system operating. The system still works as far as I know but
>> it's only got a 2 GB hard drive so not good for much other than to demo it.
>> Always wanted to get more memory and disk into the system.
>>
>> It would be soooo excellent to be able to run something like NetBSD on the
>> Solbourne systems.
>
> I'm surprised that NetBSD doesn't. Maybe it's just a boot loader/PROM issue?
>
> Actually I thought Soulbourne systems were compatible to Sun ones
> except for (S)MP. Is it not so?
> Was it possible to run OS/MP on Sun machines?

No because at the time Sun did not have any SMP capability (OS/MP had it 
well before Sun did). In fact Sun didn't get proper SMP until well into 
the SunOS 5.x OS period. SunOS 5.4 I think might have been when it first 
appeared (aka Solaris 2[.4]).

I used to know more about this. I don't think Stephen Dowdy's old 
Solbourne Shack site (at the University of Colorado) operates any more and 
much of the info from his site has probably disappeared.

>> I don't know if anyone has access to the internal
>> hardware specs for the Kbus systems any more. Solbourne itself certainly
>> doesn't (since it's been a software-only company since about 1990 when the
>> hardware side was flogged to Grumman).
>
> Well obviously they knew the specs good enough to write an OS. Would
> have been enough for the NetBSD guys too.

It might be a case of getting access to that info before any work can 
progress on modifying the NetBSD code to accomodate the differences 
between the Sun and Solbourne systems that ran on the early sun-4c family 
processors.

Craig.

-- 
Craig Dewick - Adelaide Australia - Web: http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick"
Email: [email protected] - SunShack: http://www.sunshack.org
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