[FreeVMS] FreeVMS

[Roar Thronæs]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 07:43:37AM +0200, BERTRAND Joël wrote:
> 
> FreeVMS project was created a long time ago. First kernels (until 0.3) 
> were derivated from Linux kernel (2.4.15 if I remember) and were 
> monolithic. These kernels were bootable but not easely maintenable.

Yes, I know, but it was small enough with few hardware drivers,
since qemu supported only a few.
I would consider it small enough to be further changable/convertible/
transformable, to something non-monolithic, but gave it low priority.
I gave it low priority, because:

For a user who is downloading an image and running it with qemu,
does not see whether it is monolithic or not.
The user will only notice features like logicals, type, dir, show system etc.
For developers of userland utilities/libraries and parts of the kernel,
it would not matter either whether the kernel was monolithic or not.

> 0.4 is rewritten from scratch on a L4 (like Hurd is written on a Mach 
> kernel or MacOS X on NVU). L4 is choosen because it deos not contains 
> unixism. It boots, it contains first memory management subroutines, but 
> pager is missing.

This will be a bit harder than transforming the 0.3 kernel
(but probably a more interesting/rewarding learning process).
It will be interesting to see how ASTs and IPLs will be implemented now.

Will you actually write everything from scratch?
I integrated/took a lot from various places.
(Some libraries/rtl/starlet and userland ODS-2/RMS from the very first
FreeVMS project, if my memory serves me right.
DFU from DEC with open (enough?) source.
The CMUIP TCP/IP stack.
Something for DCL and EDT from Ozone from www.o3one.org.
Probably more.)

-- 
-Roar