rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) (01/18/89)
[A recent question in comp.unix.microport reminded me of this...]
Some time back, probably more than a year ago, I heard of the beginnings of
a project to put a BSD system on the PC/AT. (I mean a regular 286 box.)
Can anyone tell me whether it is happening, has happened, didn't make it,
or what?
If you speak for the project, please post. Otherwise, if you have
information about it, EMAIL to me and I'll summarize in a posting.
adthanksvance
--
Dick Dunn UUCP: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd (303)449-2870
...A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.donn@titan.rice.edu (Donn Baumgartner) (01/19/89)
In article <13702@ico.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes: >[A recent question in comp.unix.microport reminded me of this...] >Some time back, probably more than a year ago, I heard of the beginnings of >a project to put a BSD system on the PC/AT. (I mean a regular 286 box.) >Can anyone tell me whether it is happening, has happened, didn't make it, >or what? It's *still* happening... just very slowly - the people really intense about seeing this project to fruition are both employed in the 'real' world, too. No, there's not just 2 of us on the project, but only 2 of us continue to beat on this project on a regular basis. Here's the status: (1) we need more help (you need a BSD source license which covers at least one 286 box; we don't use any system 5 stuff anymore) (2) the system now runs standalone on an AT, no extra hardware is needed (although the AT needs 2+ meg of memory... big deal); we have device drivers for the native display, keyboard, disk, serial ports, floppy, & UB ethernet card. (3) we are currently focusing on getting the bugs (mostly long vs. int problems) out of libc and user level applications. There is still kernel hacking which needs to be done. The native development environment includes microemacs, make, cc, less, and so forth. Native bootstrap and (DOS style) partition code is 'nearly' done. (4) we need more help (especially people with 'spare' time) Basically things have come a long way since we started, and basically we have a ways to go. Since we have serial port support, I suppose things like uucp and such could be usefully run on our system... but we attack problems on a "we need this now" basis (and so we haven't played with all your favorite programs found on 'production' systems). And no, we don't know for sure what will happen when/if we ever 'finish' this port... I kinda liked the idea of giving it back to Ber(zer)keley; of course, at the current rate, that will be about the time they issue 9.2 BSD (sigh). If you're interested, curious, or whatever, just mail to me at: donn@titan.rice.edu and I'll try to give a more coherent description of what's happening with the project (more coherent: I've not slept for a while, again) - Donn Baumgartner