Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!samsung!munnari.oz.au!metro!macuni!sunc!ifarqhar
From: ifarqhar@sunc.mqcc.mq.oz.au (Ian Farquhar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: AmigaOS/UNIX - A Suggestion
Message-ID: <606@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz>
Date: 10 Oct 90 15:32:10 GMT
Sender: news@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz
Organization: Macquarie University, Sydney
Lines: 28

Recently, at a visit to CBM Australia, Macquarie was given a demo of the
A3000 UX.  In further discussions were were talking about the
utilisation of disk space on the 100M machine, and how it just was not
practical to put in an AmigaOS partition as the Unix system needed
around 60M with a 10M swap partition etc.  It just did not leave enough
room for user files.

So here is a small suggestion that I submit to the net for
consideration.  Why not, through the use of a loadable handler, let AmigaOS 
share the UNIX partition.  The user's perception of the UNIX FS is similar
enough to the AmigaOS FS (file names etc), and I can see few problems
writing an I-node handler to run under AmigaOS.  You would lose file
comments and possibly a couple of other rarely used features, but that
presents no terrible difficulty.  Remember that there will be no sharing
problems, as both OS's cannot at present run simultaneously (alas!)

The beauty of this system is that you now only need to allocate a 2M (or
even 1M) partition to store the AmigaOS boot files, then you assign
everything to the newly mounted UNIX filing system.

I can see no fundamental technical difficulty with this idea, and I
personally would find it very useful.  Comments, anyone?

--
Ian Farquhar                      Phone : 61 2 805-9403
Office of Computing Services      Fax   : 61 2 805-7433
Macquarie University  NSW  2109   Also  : 61 2 805-7205
Australia                         EMail : ifarqhar@suna.mqcc.mq.oz.au