rabin@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Rabin Ezra) (01/17/91)
Does anyone out there have, or know of a source of a program to
turn a Sun 3/50 into an Xterminal. The idea would be to get
rid of the overhead of unix. This would give us a use for
scrap, unmaintained machines which would otherwise die.
Rabin Ezra
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U.K.mouse@lightning.mcrcim.mcgill.EDU (02/01/91)
> Does anyone out there have, or know of a source of a program to turn > a Sun 3/50 into an Xterminal. The idea would be to get rid of the > overhead of unix. I know of two setups designed to turn 3/50s and 3/60s into X terminals. Both of them, technically speaking, are still running UNIX on the machine, but most of the overhead is sidestepped. In both cases, a more or less normal kernel is running, but the only user-level proceess is the X server. All the other daemons which clutter typical machines' process tables are gone. The simplest thing to do, as far as I can tell, is to run a minimal kernel on the machine and make /etc/init a shell script which runs the X server. On our X-terminal 3/50 and 3/60, this is precisely what I did: on the client machine's ND root area (these are running release 3.5, so they get root and swap via ND, not NFS), /etc/init is #! /bin/sh exec >/dev/console 2>&1 /etc/fsck -p /dev/nd0 case $? in 0) ;; 4) /etc/reboot -q -n ;; 8) echo ND fsck failed - get help /etc/halt ;; 12) echo Interrupted /etc/reboot ;; *) echo Unknown error in reboot fsck - get help /etc/halt ;; esac /bin/dd if=/tmp-fs of=/dev/nd2 bs=512 count=128 >/dev/null 2>&1 /etc/mount /dev/nd2 /tmp /etc/ifconfig le0 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 132.206.41.255 /etc/mount -o ro apollo:/u2/x11/lib /local/lib/X11 /etc/route add default 132.206.41.1 1 >/dev/null exec /Xsun -once -multidisp -mux -query lightning Further commentary available by email, should you wish it. I suppose it would be possible to turn such machines into true X terminals, by building a kernel that includes the X server. However, it seems like more trouble than it's worth. Using a normal UNIX kernel gives you paging and swapping for free, for example. (And you can use anything UNIX can: and if your 3/50 has a shoebox on it, say, you can page and swap there instead with basically nil effort.) der Mouse old: mcgill-vision!mouse new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu