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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/2/22 4:01 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/2/2022 1:36 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> 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...
> 
> https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/xlicense.html
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> Remember that Simon believes using C makes porting easy.
> 
> Great opportunity to demonstrate.
> 


Sadly, language has little to do with it.  Too  much of the
DEC stuff is still proprietary and trade secret locked.  Last
I heard that was the reason why neither NetBSD or OpenBSD ever
had a functioning X11.

bill