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From: zemon@felix.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Future Patches To Make Minix Usable in the Real World
Message-ID: <2950@felix.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 16:03:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: felix.2950
Posted: Tue Jun  9 16:03:06 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jun-87 02:05:03 EDT
References: <114@jc3b21.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@felix.UUCP
Reply-To: zemon@felix.UUCP (Art Zemon)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
Lines: 75

Feeling verbose today, I offer my comments, some sarcastic
(to be taken in fun, not as flames), and some serious.

In article <114@jc3b21.UUCP> gordon@jc3b21.UUCP (R. Gordon Price) writes:
>(1) the C compiler and MINIX upchucks floating point numbers at run time.
>    the documentation coyly warns of this. God, how do you write any kind
>    of applications even for fun only without real numbers?? HELP!!

What's a real number?  If it cannot be expressed as a
quantity between -2^31 and 2^31, do you really need to
express it at all?  I guess my hacking tends toward integers
since I can only remember one floating point program which I
have written in the last few years (mortgage payment
approximation).  Even the stuff I do which deals with money
counts integer pennies.

>(2) The boot operation leaves me wondering why a hard disk was not used
>    right off the top. Who would ever try to run UNIX on floppies??

The only reason I would want to run Minix on floppies would
be if I had to go back to college days when a hard disk was
beyond my means.  Minix does run nicely on two floppies and
I did quite a bit of kernel hacking to get it up on my hard
disk in that environment.

>(3) There is no multi-user capabilities provided as I read it. I only
>    need one for testing purposes. I know the processor is brain dead and
>    that is the basic problem. Has anyone written a /dev/tty02 or higher
>     that works??

Someone posted an RS232 driver a few days ago.  If you
cannot find it then I can mail you a copy.  I have not run
it yet but....

>(5) The ram disk uses up too much memory that could be used by other tasks.
>    Can this be killed and sent to disk where it belongs??

Most certainly!  The "patch" involves gutting the routine
inside the file system which loads the RAM disk (I think it
is called "load_ram").  I can mail you my code if you want.
I could also mail you a boot floppy which uses /dev/hd1 as
the root file system.  I also have a combined boot and root
file system floppy.

>(6) NO SWAPPING IMPLEMENTED IS A HORROR!! What can I say?

Now that I have a RAM disk which is zero bytes long, I have
540K of available memory.  My poor CPU runs out of steam
long before I run out of memory.

>(8) This is a rephrase of #2 above: can you boot directly to hard disk
>    without any floppys? I can get /dev/hd0 to work as /dev/hd0 but I
>    can not boot directly to /dev/hd0.

I suppose you could if you wanted to run Minix exlusively.
I have my system set up so that I get MS-DOS by booting from
the hard disk and Minix by booting from my Minix boot
floppy.  This is the only floppy I use since my root (and
only) file system is on the hard disk.  As soon as I type
"=", Minix is running.

>(9) FSCK should be renamed "Fragment,Crash,Collate,Kill". If you use an 
>    entire hard disk partition for MINIX which works fine by the way, FSCK
>    will screw it up because FSCK is expecting partitions 1-4 and not
>    partition 0.. If I ignore running FSCK I have no problems.

Hmmmm.  I have no trouble with fsck on /dev/hd1.  Have you
tried making partition 1 the entire disk and using /dev/hd1
instead of /dev/hd0?

--
	-- Art Zemon
	   FileNet Corporation
	   Costa Mesa, California
	   ...!hplabs!felix!zemon