Re: Regarding the ULTRIX and OSF1 compats

[Maxime Villard <max%m00nbsd.net@localhost>]

Le 16/03/2019 à 06:23, John Nemeth a écrit :
> On Mar 15, 10:31pm, Michael Kronsteiner wrote:
> }
> } i have this discussion today aswell... considering 64/32bit machines.
> } if you want ultrix, install ultrix. if you want osf1/dec unix/tru64
> } install that. being able to run ummm.... nearly 20 year old binaries...
> } well. if thats what you want be prepared for a ride. i never ran
> } "foreign" binaries on a BSD. and i often compile myself even on more
> } "user friendly" systems.
>
>       By any chance, have you seen our About page:
> http://www.netbsd.org/about/ ?  The second paragraph reads thus:
>
> -----
> One of the primary focuses of the NetBSD project has been to make
> the base OS highly portable. This has resulted in NetBSD being
> ported to a large number of hardware platforms. NetBSD is also
> interoperable, implementing many standard APIs and network protocols,
> and emulating many other systems' ABIs.
> -----
>
> Emulating other systems is fundamental to what NetBSD is about.

This is a really simplistic answer. It is not difficult to see that our
website does not reflect reality at all.

Regarding COMPAT_OSF1: I'm not totally sure, but it seems that Alpha's
COMPAT_LINUX uses COMPAT_OSF1 as dependency (even if there is no proper
dependency in the module), because there are osf1_* calls. Some more
compat mess to untangle, it seems...

In all cases, it's only a few functions that are just wrappers, so it
probably shouldn't be too complicated to solve.