Some intrepid soul has ported the SIMH emulator to the GBA and is using that to run the PDP-6 version of UNIX v6. Actually, looking at the stats of the (ARM-based) GBA, it would have been eye-poppingly advanced back in the late 60s. There’s a great article about it at Kernelthread. Update: Thanks to Vanders on setting me straight on which version of UNIX was actually ported.
>Thanks to Vanders on setting me straight on which version of
>UNIX was actually ported.
Wich Unix was ported???
>SCO owns the copyright for the 5th edition
We all know how that goes..before you know it SCO start sueing
kids and their gameboys..
…is there anything that it can’t do?
“…is there anything that it can’t do?”
Try disconnecting a device while it’s being read from. Chances are that will hang the process that is reading the data. Now try killing the process, chances are it won’t work, because the process is in uninterruptible sleep.
This is a “feature” of any Unix-like system I’ve tested it with.
I’ve used the SIMH emulator to run VAX/VMS 7.3 on Fedora CORE1 and Fedora CORE2 Linux to great affect. This emulator project is fantastic.
Try disconnecting a device while it’s being read from. Chances are that will hang the process that is reading the data. Now try killing the process, chances are it won’t work, because the process is in uninterruptible sleep.
First of all…why the HELL would you even want to do that?
Secondly…have you ever tried ‘kill -9’? I’ve never seen a hung process that ‘kill -9’ wouldn’t fix.
Thirdly…name one OS that would handle something like that very well. I don’t know how Windows 2K and XP are, but Windows 9x had a very good chance of bluescreening under those circumstances.
vms, i think
lovely article .. anyone seen a simialr one for compiling unix for the BBC micro (6502) or the acorn archimedes ARM RISC machines?
Then you havent truly lived!
Samba used to routinely cause processes to lock in ‘D’ uninterruptible sleep, and I have seen these issues with NFS, SMB or pretty much any network filesystem that has a kernel component.
The processes cannot be killed with ‘kill -9’, the mounts can’t be ‘force unmounted’, and the only way to clear them is to reboot – sometimes with NFS you can clear the condition by putting another machine on the network with the same IP as the failed server, but typically reboot is the only option.
I havent seen this occur often on recent kernels, but it can and does happen – and is very annoying.
I doubt you’ll ever see a port of UNIX for the BBC Micro, but there are already a couple of UNIX ports for the Archimedes. Acorn released their own UNIX called RISCiX and there’s a port of NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/acorn26/