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From: zrm@prism.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: 386
Message-ID: <6800003@prism.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 12-May-85 12:09:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: prism.6800003
Posted: Sun May 12 12:09:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 16-May-85 21:34:56 EDT
References: <2140@seismo.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:seismo:-214000:prism:6800003:177600:963
Nf-From: prism!zrm    May 12 12:09:00 1985


I get the impression that somebody at Intel really believes that lots of
segments are a feature rather than a bug. But I won't be convinced until I
can use those segments to advantage -- as is done in Multics. This means
that segments have to be of varying sizes, and have a paging system
underneath the segments, and have a mechanism for generating linkage faults
(detecting unresolved external references at run-time in a recoverable
manner). The 286 can detect refernces to a segment that has been swapped out
and can recover from those faults, but all of those refernces were resolved
at link-time. This leaves us about halfway to Multics (the good parts of
Multics, that is) in a micro. Will the 386 go the rest of the way? Is there
some clever hack to simulate linkage sections with the 286 addressing modes
and segements? And last, but not least, are there any companies doing
systems software that would take advantage of such capabilities?

Cheers,
-Zig