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From: arthur@warwick.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: Re: 32000 Processors (Really: MINIX on 32016)
Message-ID: <546@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 13:39:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubu.546
Posted: Tue Jun  9 13:39:24 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 14-Jun-87 20:04:04 EDT
Reply-To: arthur@ubu.UUCP (John Vaudin)
Organization: Computer Science, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 53

From: brian@udcps1.UUCP (Brian R. Haug)
> 
>The only operating system that everyone agrees to be available is 
>Unix,  and not cheap,  and no source or configurability.   But it
>comes with everything in the world.
> 
...
>                  LET'S WRITE AN OPERATING SYSTEM!
> 
>It seems to me that one of the principal lacks in the "hacker"  or 
>computer  hobbyist  world today  is  a  portable,  simple,  easily 
>configurable  operating system.   Naturally,  the dream  of  every 
>programmer  is to create his own operating system,  but  operating 
>systems  don't sell well in the marketplace...  so let's  give  it 
>away for free!

Have you heard about MINIX ??. This is a cheap <$100 UNIX V7 look alike
for the IBM PC. It comes with the source for the kernel and about 60
utilities many of which are genuine public domain. There is a book
called "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" available from 
Prentice Hall, written by Andy Tanenbaum who also wrote the kernel and
many of the utilities. Although it is system call compatible with 
V7 UNIX it is totally different inside, being small <50K and very modular
The kernel is actually many processes which communicate by message 
passing. It will never be a really high performance system but it is
easy to understand and modify, and also portable.

This is of course really the issue here. Myself and some friends have 
just finished porting this system to the ns32016. It works very nicely
and I'm sure could be made even better. At the moment it inherits 
a rather simplistic memory management scheme from the PC, but this could
easily (?) be extended to support VM given the hardware support the 32000
CPU&MMU provide. Its not too bad as is, at least processes are protected
from each other so system crashes are very rare. 

It seems to fit most of your criteria, it is multi tasking and the source
is available very cheaply. It could easily provide the kind of common
software base that you mention. Given the commonality of the 32000 family 
across different hardware implementations I would think it would be
very easy to port it to other 32000 based machines.

The one thing we lack at present is a PD or at least very cheap C compiler
We are investigating the GNU compiler, and have had several offers of
32000 back ends for it. Stay tuned for more further developments.

> 
>Do you have any ideas?  Let's work together on this.
>
Fine !

John Vaudin

arthur@uk.ac.warwick.ubu