A Brief Retrospective on the Sprite Network Operating System
Summary
This article is a retrospective on the Sprite network operating system, providing access to its source code, documentation, and research papers on GitHub for historical and educational purposes.
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OSPreservProject/sprite
Source: https://github.com/OSPreservProject/sprite
The Sprite Operating System
This respository includes the source code, executables, documentation and research papers for the Sprite network operating system. Sprite is a distributed systems research project led by Prof. John Ousterhout in the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley. Besides Prof. Ousterhout, the research team has included Brent Welch, Andrew Cherenson, Fred Douglis, Mike Nelson, Adam de Boor, Mendel Rosenblum, Mary Baker, Bob Bruce, John Hartman, Ken Shirriff, Mike Kupfer, Jim Mott-Smith, Geoff Voelker, and Matt Secor. Many others have also contributed to the system.
Nothing on this repository is guaranteed to work. This collection of source, executables, documentation and papers was put together in a great hurry. While we were able to test some aspects, much was left untested. Make what use of it you can, but we will not be available to fix problems.
Right now sprite only supports two venerable architectures, the sun4 series (but not the sun4m, necessary for qemu support) and the DECstation (supported by gxemul). Initial attempts to get Sprite running in emulation should probably revolve around booting the ds5000.bt image in gxemul.
The correct invocation to boot the DECstation image in gexemul is:
gxemul -X -e 3max -M128 -d ds5000.bt -j vmsprite -o ‘’
This repository contains the following files and directories:
| file | directory |
|---|---|
| admin | directory for administrative programs, scripts and information |
| boot.txt | file with information about booting the Sprite kernel images |
| docs | directory for documentation |
| ds5000.bt | boot image for Sprite on a DECstation 5000/200 |
| sun4.bt | boot image for Sprite on a SparcStation 2 |
| lib | directory for library files other than source files |
| filename.lst | A list of all the files on the disc |
| ls_lR | output from ls -lR, a recursive list of the files on the disc |
| man | directory for manual pages |
| papers | directory for research papers about Sprite |
| readme.txt | file that describes this CD-ROM |
| sprite.txt | file with a history of the Sprite project |
| src | directory for source code for kernel, commands, libraries, etc |
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