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From: dave@micropen (David F. Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Microport 2.30.10 Beta response
Message-ID: <373@micropen>
Date: Wed, 9-Sep-87 11:52:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: micropen.373
Posted: Wed Sep  9 11:52:57 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 07:22:54 EDT
Organization: Micropen Direct Writing Systems, Pittsford, NY
Lines: 41

Apologies to the flamers about Microport on this net:  in another 2 years
you xenix people will have ATT UNIX too!

I received a beta of Microport's 2.30.10 yesterday.  (I hope the number of
numbers they have isn't an indicator that they'll need that many revs!)

Well, people shl(1) and all it implies works!  And well too.  For those who 
don't have shell layers, it is a control program that allows many (8) jobs
to be run from one terminal (or virtual console!!) and ^Z'd and restarted
just like our Berkeley people.  ATT does this by specifiying a BLOCK on a
tty line of an inactive job so it waits in IO but otherwise runs.  Shl(1)
allows creation, deletion etc., of these shells.  The shells are named at
create time and may be called by name or number (number is the only way to
call up a shell under Berkeley job control.)

Other nice things are a massively reworked console/keyboard driver that works
now!  Both the floppy driver and the wini driver appear reworked.  Support
for the tape driver is hinted at but not included in my Beta copy.  The old
beta tape driver doesn't work do to reworked and conflicting dma calls.
(The dma structure under 2.2 was a kluge for the tape drive as the floppy
driver already had dma stuff.  The rework was a good thing in all likelihood,
however, it breaks code now.)

I haven't tested the tty drivers yet but they appear reworked also.

The console will now support 16 virtcons!  (How about each with 8 shell layers!)
And has some fascinating ioctl's for attaching and detaching console(s) and
(!!!) windows.  Undocumented but fascinating.

The big drag is a new boot code that hasn't been worked very well.  I tested it
on Pheonix and AMI Bios and got *very* different results and Microport tested it
on AWARD and TVI and got different results from my machines!  Oh well.  Should
be worked out soon though.  (The plus of the new boot is that it is supposed to
allow boot from any kernel plus dos from the dos partition of the hard disk.)

Things are getting better.
-- 
David F. Carlson, Micropen, Inc.
...!{seismo}!rochester!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave

"The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll