[SunRescue] Sun3 emulation?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, May 1, 2001 at 11:04:14 (-0500), Bill Bradford wrote: ]
> Subject: [SunRescue] Sun3 emulation?
>
> I have a friend whose company has a bunch of older binaries (no
> source; it was lost long ago) for SunOS/Sun3 that they'd like
> to be able to run and get to again.  Anybody know of a tool to
> emulate Sun3 (moto 68K) running SunOS on a modern platform?
> 
> The 68k emulator wouldnt be hard, but the rest of the "system"
> plus the SunOS stuff would be a bit harder....

You can run SunOS-4 binaries on NetBSD/sun3 as long as you have any of
the needed shared libraries and a copy of ld.so, etc. handy.

You can probably even run them on any other NetBSD/mc68k platform too.

I don't know that you'd be modernising much, though if the binaries
already run at an acceptable level of performance, and if you've got
enough parts to keep the existing hardware running, why change anything?
If you changed anything you could still upgrade to NetBSD and have a
modern and secure OS for the same platform.

You could even upgrade them to the fastest most powerful sun-3 ever at
very low cost!  ;-)

NetBSD-current should now have almost the same performance of SunOS-4 on
sun-3 hardware (though you might wait until they integrate the new pipes
implementation from FreeBSD...).

As for emulators, well I suppose that's possible, but I don't know of
any off hand.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>