Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!imagine!pawl19.pawl.rpi.edu!jesup
From: jesup@pawl19.pawl.rpi.edu (Randell E. Jesup)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Jerry Pournelle on UNIX (From BYTE)
Message-ID: <206@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: 12 Jan 88 05:15:45 GMT
References: <1495@osiris.UUCP> <28200084@ccvaxa>
Sender: news@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU
Reply-To: beowulf!lunge!jesup@steinmetz.UUCP
Organization: RPI Public Access Workstation Lab - Troy, NY
Lines: 21

In article <28200084@ccvaxa> aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP writes:
>Several people have expressed worry about the maintainability,
>or vulnerability to bugs, of UNIX in ROM.
>
>The appropriate way to use ROM is as a library, with, perhaps,
>minimal glue code. All calls to ROM routines should be via a
>dispatch table which ROM loads into RAM. The dispatch table can
>then be patched, perhaps to pint to new RAM code for bug fixes.

	Sounds like the Amiga sharable libraries.  Consists of a library
base (returned by OpenLibrary); jmp vectors at negative offsets; a library
node, public data, and private data at positive offsets.  At boot, these
are built in ram from the roms, where the routines live.  You can also
have ram-resident libraries that can survive re-boot if they checksum
correctly.
	You can change a library entry via SetFunction().

     //	Randell Jesup			      Lunge Software Development
    //	Dedicated Amiga Programmer            13 Frear Ave, Troy, NY 12180
 \\//	beowulf!lunge!jesup@steinmetz.UUCP    (518) 272-2942
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