Re: Regarding the ULTRIX and OSF1 compats

[Jonathan Stone <kiwi_jonathan%yahoo.com@localhost>]

Hello all,

I don't see anyone asking to keep COMPAT_OSF1.  It was never useful enough to run "real" (arbitrary) OSF/1 binaries.
Please just remove it, and remove  "and OSF1" from the Subject: line.

COMPAT_ULTRIX, is complete enough to run commercial apps; vendor X-servers for all commonly-available pmax graphics boards; and to routinely go multi-user from an Ultrix root partition.  Thorpej was far from the only person to use that, when pmaxes and VAXes were practical production machines. 
Lots of academic users who had pmax hardware, shifted from Ultrix to NetBSD: better performance (from shared libraries). Some even said "better support".    (No support for DEcsystem 5400s, but those weren't actually "pmax'.)

As noted, Ultrix was derived from 4BSD, somewhere between 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD, with 4.3ish features back-ported, and an in-house NFS port (gnodes). So COMPAT_ULTRIX is a very thin layer on top of NetBSD.  If NetBSD-current  supports compatibility for NetBSD-4 or NetBSD-6, or even SunOS 4.x on Sparc, then supporting COMPAT_ULTRIX should be trivial, modulo testing.

Testing is a real issue.  Anyone want to host a pmax or three?    I could be persuaded to fire one up for specific testing, but it'll take a couple of weekends, maybe more. (It's been years since I had thinwire (BNC) connectivity)