warning : long boring message
I was curious to see a manpage for machid(1) which has not been updated
since 5 Jul 1990. A good solid 17.5 years more or less. The manpage makes
reference to IBM System/370 and VAX-11/750 and PDP-11/45. Systems that I
have not seen in twenty years or so. I fell upon this because I was looking
through a successful build of onnv_78 that I have here and saw this in
/usr/bin :
# ls -oin /usr/bin/i286
2739 -r-xr-xr-x 29 0 8644 Dec 12 12:30 /usr/bin/i286
I thought that it looked somewhat out of place and quite possibly of
historical interest only. Functionality long since replace with uname -p. I
looked in the sources and metadata for SUNWcsu and saw that the package
prototype :
usr/src/pkgdefs/SUNWcsu/prototype_com
indicated there were links to usr/bin/mc68020 and others thus :
# grep i286 usr/src/pkgdefs/SUNWcsu/prototype_com
f none usr/bin/i286 555 root bin
l none usr/bin/i386=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/i486=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/i860=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/i86pc=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/iAPX286=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/m68k=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/mc68000=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/mc68010=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/mc68020=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/mc68030=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/mc68040=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/pdp11=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sparc=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun2=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun3=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun3x=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun4=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun4c=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun4d=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun4e=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun4m=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/sun=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/u370=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/u3b15=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/u3b2=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/u3b5=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/u3b=../../usr/bin/i286
l none usr/bin/vax=../../usr/bin/i286
I was curious about why these were still around. Perhaps they were needed in
scripts in various legacy software packages or something similar. I looked
into this and found usr/src/cmd/Adm/sun/README tells us we have found the
brother to /usr/kvm/i286 which is :
These are documented on the machid(1) manual page.
These are fully deprecated interfaces.
I went looking for the sources to usr/bin/i286 and could not find them. I
did find machid.c which seems to simply call sysinfo(2) in order to fetch
the architecture string of the current machine.
Will these sort of things, like machid and iAPX286 and pdp11, be carried
forwards in the next OpenSolaris binary release and is there a way to
finally remove such things?
-
Dennis Clarke
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