DEC OSF/1 for i386?

Guy Sotomayor ggs at shiresoft.com
Fri Apr 29 12:07:05 CDT 2022


I was at IBM when OSF (and subsequently OSF/1) was created and had a lot 
of discussions with OSF at that time.  At IBM I was working on the IBM 
Microkernel.  OSF/1 also used Mach (but a different source base) as the 
kernel.  The big effort was to keep the APIs and documentation 
"similar".  We had huge arguments about RPC and I think that's the area 
that we didn't converge which I think made the whole thing pointless 
since the IPC/RPC was one of the main points of Mach.  :-/

I don't know what DEC did in terms of their OSF/1 product, but I know at 
IBM we had 2 principle "ports" that we maintained (PPC & x86) as well as 
a few others (MIPS, StrongARM, 68K being the other ones as I recall) 
that we "kept alive".

TTFN - Guy

On 4/29/22 07:45, Dennis Grevenstein via cctech wrote:
> Hi,
>
> just recently I found this archive:
>
> https://vetusware.com/download/OSF1%20Source%20Code%201.10/?id=11574
>
> this is a package of source code for DEC OSF/1 V 1.0. I knew that this is
> supposed to run on DECstations (with MIPS), in fact I have a DS3100
> running it myself.
> However, one thing really puzzled me: This archive apparently includes
> support for i386. There is even a kernel build log from 1990.
> Now that was news to me. I never realized that this worked on i386.
> Can anybody here tell any stories about this?
>
> regards,
> Dennis

-- 
TTFN - Guy



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