Re: Proposal: remove OSF/1 support

[Jason Thorpe <thorpej%me.com@localhost>]

> On Apr 3, 2022, at 11:46 AM, Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 31 Mar 2022 14:48:31 +0000 (UTC)
> John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> According to a rather upset person on reddit, bootstrap has been
>>> broken for years, and I don't think we have the capability to test
>>> this platform even if we want to, since it's a proprietary platform
>>> that only runs on hardware that is increasingly rare.
>> 
>> I remember ages ago being able to run a whole SCO environment inside of a 
>> chroot on NetBSD. I've never tried OSF/1 on NetBSD/alpha, but if someone 
>> has Tru64 files, I'll give it a try.
> 
> COMPAT_OSF1 was removed in NetBSD 9 so this venue closed.
> 
> Qemu is not quite there yet either. It is closer than before because
> a fairly complete open-source PALcode firmware was developed last year.
> It still needs ability to run the stage 1 boot loader or an ECOFF kernel
> loader to be able to run Tru64.

I doubt that OSF/1 / Tru64 could run on w/ the Qemu PALcode… It would definitely be closer to being able to do so after I fixed several bugs in it, but I suspect there are big gaps in some of the console-provided data structures that OSF/1 would expect to be present.

-- thorpej