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

[chris]

On 01/05/22 13:28, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-01-04, chris<chris-nospam at tridac.net>  wrote:
>>
>> 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...
>>
>
> There are a number of academic created operating systems that are
> interesting in their own right. None run on VAX however. :-)
>
> Here's one I look at every so often:
>
> http://www.helenos.org/
>
> Simon.
>


A bit late getting back to this, but that looks quite interesting.
Message passing design has been my favourite ipc method for some
time now. Have written a simple round robin, run to completion
task scheduler where each task is a state machine that waits for
the next message, doing nothing otherwise. Specifically for low
resource embedded work, completely in C, with no asm low level
context switching, so completely portable. A sort of proof of
concept idea and have used it for one of my own projects.

I try to keep up with the mainstream OS development, releases
and typically evaluate several over thw course of each year. Recent
examples include Open Solaris Hipster, (very well sorted) and
Devuan Linux, sans systemd. There is also SmartOs from Joyent,
a hypervisor that combines features of Open Solaris with Linux
KVM to provide a virtualisation environment, with templates for
each OS hosted. Did a quick install recently, took less than half
an hour and will revisit that later in the year. FreeBSD is still
the goto OS for most work here at present though...

Chris