On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Matthew Sell wrote:
be possible to
do one of the following options:
1) Stick an 'emulation' user-mode shell on top of some free *nix
2) Take a stock free *nix kernel, and modify it to work more like VMS.
That was the idea. I thought of taking FreeBSD, and add device drivers for
peripherals and filesystems, as well as implementing the "shell".
I do have various VAXen to test this on.
You might be able to get the feel of VMS, but getting all the neat
features of VMS (decnet, clustering, binary compatibility) would be highly
problematic. Plus administration would be a completely different animal.
Of course, the
problem is deciding what ONE kernel to use (prolly BSD or
Linux 2.??), and how to trim down the kernel to a small set of drivers for
testing it.
I was thinking about using FreeBSD, simply for the availability of many
platform ports, including VAX.
If you want BSD that works the same on all sorts of hardware, FreeBSD is
not it. It's too x86-centric. Look at NetBSD
http://www.netbsd.org/
Peace... Sridhar