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From: coatta@utcsri.UUCP (Terry Coatta)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: AmigaDOS
Message-ID: <2061@utcsri.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Feb-86 12:01:06 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsri.2061
Posted: Wed Feb  5 12:01:06 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Feb-86 12:42:44 EST
References: <1149@caip.RUTGERS.EDU> <2987@ncsu.UUCP>
Reply-To: coatta@utcsri.UUCP (Terry Coatta)
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 13
Summary: 

Although the full source code for XINU is given in the Comer book, it
is of limited use.  Many parts of the system would require a substantial
amount of rewriting.  For instance, the file system that Comer uses is
completely flat, and restricted to a maximum of 26 files.  Any useable
version of XINU would have to have the entire set of file system routines
rewritten.  For the Amiga, there would also be massive amounts of code
required to allow XINU to have a pretty visual interface, since Comer
assumes "tty-like" terminals.  Finally, I might add that XINU is not
what I would refer to as good clean OS design (its alot better than some
real OS code I've seen...) -- the use of interrupts, and system processes
is fairly complex, and needlessly so (just look at the way a Thoth
system deals with interrupts, which more or less just makes them look
like messages delivered by another process).