SYS V R4 - When will it be released for Generic 386 boxes?

[Charles Hedrick]

>That depends on who you ask.  I personally would kill for job-control
>and the BSD filesystem on a 386.

It should not be necessary to kill.  I have job control on SVr2 on my
286 at home.  Ksh has code in it that does a pretty good emulation of
Berkeley job control using the System V sxt device.  The necessary
kernel support should be present on any System V since release 2.
However you may have to rebuild your kernel to include support for the
sxt device.  (At least with Microport, it's optional, so you have to
get the linkkit and build a kernel.)  If shl will run on your system,
this will.  The problem is getting you the appropriate ksh.
Unfortunately, Korn (author of ksh) considers System V sufficiently
brain damaged that he was unwilling to take back the fixes that make
job control work on it.  (This seems a bad attitude for an ATT
employee.)  So as far as I know, I've got the only copy of ksh where
job control actually works.  If your site has a ksh source license, I
can just send you diffs.  If you have or can get a binary license, I
can probably give you my binary.  (I'd have to check the license to
make sure -- most ATT licenses allow people to give code to other
sites with licenses having similar scope.)  Microport SV/AT includes
ksh binaries.  I think their 386 product does as well.  So your 386
might already have it.  If you can show that your system is licensed
for ksh, I think it would be legal for me to give you a copy of the
version with job control.  As far as I know, SV/AT executables work on
all of the 386 SV's except AIX (and AIX has real job control).