Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!aipna!awb From: awb@ed.ac.uk (Alan W Black) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: MINIX on a 486? Message-ID: Date: 11 Jun 91 09:14:05 GMT References: <13393@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> Sender: news@aipna.ed.ac.uk Reply-To: awb@ed.ac.uk (Alan W Black) Organization: Dept of AI, Edinburgh University, UK Lines: 81 In-reply-to: asg@sage.cc.purdue.edu's message of 10 Jun 91 20:23:17 GMT In article <13393@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> asg@sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) writes: From: asg@sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) > Hello. > I currently have a 286 running MINIX. Within the next 1.5 years however, > I plan on upgrading to either an Amiga (running Amiga SYS5r4) or a > 486. The current 486 that I am looking at is a Gateway 2000 486-33. > I would get it with 40MB of memory, and two 200MB IDE drives. Now > my questions: > > -Will the extensions to MINIX for a 386 work equally well on a 486? I have run Minix with Bruce's patches on a 486 with no problems (I've also heard of others doing this). > -Is a 15-20MB Ramdisk feasable? Yes (if you have enough memory). There is (possibly) a problem in using more 16M on minix but that should be fixed soon. However I see little point in having such a large ram disk. It is better to have a fast hard disk and a reasonably sized buffer (a few meg). > -Is anyone out there working on (or planning on) extensions to MINIX > for a 486, or will any 486 extensions be applicable to a 386 as well. I'm not sure what the real differences are. The 486 has a floating point processor as part of it. I've never heard of a compiler that takes advantage of it (gcc doesn't seem to have any 486 extensions). So I assume it is basically 386 with better cache, pipelining and floating point. Thus no real extensions to minix would have relevant. > -Is anyone out there working on Job control, swapping&paging, and/or > sockets for MINIX? Sockets are being worked on. Job control and swapping/pagin may be too but they'll be some time. As someone else said BSD will be available "soon" for almost free. (Someone disagreed but I'm not sure why -- the "soon" bit is the most arguable). CMU's MACH and GNU's system will come along, but I suspect they'll all be merged. These systems will be free (from the software licence point of view) but probably non-trivial to install. However if you want a unix with source at an affordable price now, Minix is the only option. > -Is there a higher power UNIX(tm)-like OS out there with complete source > that would have Job Control, swapping/paging, sockets, etc? Source really is the question. Only Minix has source sold to the masses. BSD and AT&T licences are possible (most universities have a source licence) but they are too expensive for the individual. There are other SysV based unix's for pcs but none of them will include source unless you pay lots of dollars. > -What are the problems associated with MINIX on IDE drives. I use a 210Meg IDE drive and have never noticed any problems, nor did anything special to minix to make it work. > -I have heard that there is a 32M limit on MINIX partitions. If so, > 4*32=128 which would leave 72MB/drive unoccupied. Any suggestions > on how to work around this? I have a 64Meg partition, larger than that it stops working. I vaguely remember discussion on the net about this so I suspect it can be made bigger. > -Would I be better off getting a more high-power (and more high-priced :-( ) > UNIX(tm)-like OS (propbably without the source)? > Well it depends. If you want X and want to program in it (rather than just want to use a window system). The bigger system's will usually allow X, tcp-ip etc which might be what you want but if you just want an interesting system to hack that runs a c compiler, debugger, emacs and many things from the net Minix is a good choice. Alan Alan W Black 80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK Dept of Artificial Intelligence tel: (+44) -31 650 2713 University of Edinburgh email: awb@ed.ac.uk