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From: sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Minix 1.5 Answers
Message-ID: <7725@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 25 Sep 90 10:34:23 GMT
References: <31430@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
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GWO110%URIACC.BITNET@brownvm.brown.edu (F. Michael Theilig) writes:
>On 24 Sep 90 14:53:31 GMT you said: (Steven Reiz, that's me)
>>Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Amiga Minix 1.5:
>>Q: What are the hardware requirements to run Minix?
>>A: An amiga with an 68000, 1 MB of ram (or more) and 1 or more
>>   floppy drives.
>>   Note that this does include A2000s and expanded A500s and A1000s
>>   but that it does not include amigas with 680x0s where x>0, sorry.
>>
>     Does this mean it won't work on a 68010?

My own amiga has a 68010 (wauw!, a 5% speedup :-) and I did test minix on it.
It was a couple of months ago and i'm pretty sure that i tested a prerelease
version, so i'm not 100% sure of this but as i remember minix did boot fine
and worked all right until an address error occured.
(This can for example be produced by compiling and executing
 main() { *(short *)1=0; } )

Using an 68000, minix catches the trap, kills the program and produces something
like 'memory fault - core dumped'. An 68010 saves a different (larger) exception
frame on the stack for address errors. This causes minix to crash.
The bottom line is that you could run this version on a 68010 but it would not
be as error-resistant as running it on a 68000.
You could fix it in the kernel code yourself by having minix pop some more
bytes from the stack after certain exceptions have occured then it does now,
or you could take out the 68010 and put that good old 68000 back in.
This is of course not a very neat solution but it is what I do when I want to
minix seriously, the 5% speedup is (in my opinion/case) just a gimmick to 
impress friends with.

>     Will DNet compile under Minix?

I think that DNet contains lots of DOS-specific stuff (handlers etc) which
are user processes under AmigaOS but would have to be incorporated into the
minix filesystem (NOT a user process). This would require a major rewrite of
DNet, as well as the minix filesystem. I could be totally wrong here because
I know next to nothing about DNet. Could someone else comment on this, maybe
Matt Dillon himself?

>>                                        Steven Reiz
> --------
>      F. Michael Theilig  -  The University of Rhode Island at Little Rest
>                            GKZ117 at URIACC.Bitnet
>                            GWO110 at URIACC.Bitnet

                        Steven Reiz