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

[chris]

On 01/02/22 15:11, 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.

Xinu was an educational OS written by Doug Comer at Purdue to teach
os classes. For the original system, it was assumed that a Vax
running BSD 4.3  or similar, typically a 750 class machine, did the
development, and a pdp11 target machine to run the developed code.

It was quite complete for it's time and was interested enough to
buy the book and later x86 and 68000 versions that ran on pc or sun 3
hardware. Not really a mainstream OS, whatever Wiki says...

Chris


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