[Info-vax] Alternative _legal_ operating systems for VAX ?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-01-02 16:11, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/2/2022 3:39 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> Before deleting my simh instances, I thought I would look for
>> other operating systems which ran on VAX and try them out.
>>
>> The only current one I have found is NetBSD (which certainly has
>> a _very_ retro 1980s Unix feel to it. :-)).
>>
>> OpenBSD dropped VAX as an architecture a number of years ago.
>>
>> Does anyone know of any other operating systems (including any
>> experimental ones) for VAX that are still legal to run under simh ?
>>
>> If so, do you have any links to them ?
> 
> Wikipedia lists BSD 4.3, NetBSD, OpenBSD and something called Xinu
> as open source options for VAX.

As far as I know Mt. Xinu (read it backwards? ;-) ) wasn't free. I ran 
it on an 8650 for a while. I think I still know where the manuals are, 
but I'm unsure if I know where the tapes are...

> NetBSD may be the only one with current support. But do you need to run
> a current version??
> 
> You did not run a current VMS version on it.
> 
> And resource wise it may be a better fit for an older OS
> anyway.

That is definitely true. It's not that pleasant to run current NetBSD on 
any VAX at the moment. But there are also some problems/issues that 
we're waiting for a new version of gcc to come along, where they have 
been fixed.

> Alternatively you could take up the Linux VAX port. Some
> work was done many years ago and I believe they got pretty
> far.

I think it booted to single user mode. Not sure it got much further. Not 
sure anyone would even want to try and pick that up, as Linux is 
constantly changing under the hood, making it a big task to resume 
something abandoned years ago.

   Johnny