Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!husc6!bunny!cayman!brad
From: brad@cayman.COM (Brad Parker)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: porting minix to the mac
Message-ID: <548@cayman.COM>
Date: 23 Jan 88 17:59:55 GMT
References: <254@csed-47.csed-1.UUCP>
Organization: Cayman Systems Inc., Cambridge Ma
Lines: 29

roskos@csed-1.UUCP (Eric Roskos):
> 
> Another problem with porting to the Mac will probably be that the really
> low-level interfaces are not well documented at all.  There is some boundary
.....

I'm interested in "Minix-on-the-Mac", but from another angle. Has anyone
thought of running minix as an application? The SCSI disk "system" used
on the Mac supports partitioning the disk, so it would be easy to write
a scsi driver and use the minix file system. Also, it would be nice to
"use" the MMU as a way to partition/protect tasks. I suspect that any MMU
hacking required would break with as-yet-unannounced-and-no-one-at-apple-
will-confirm-this MMU software for the Mac, but it would be worth trying
for the short future. (re: I'm sure apple is doing MMU work for the Mac OS,
but I'm not aware of any specifics and no one at apple has told me about it)

Anyway, it would be nifty to launch minix as an application, use it for what
ever task is required and then quit back to the Mac. Multifinder support
comes to mind, but the Minix/MMU/Multifinder interaction would probably be
way to hairy.

Anyone thought of this?

-brad
-- 

Brad Parker
Cayman Systems		"You are sleeping; you don't want to believe..."
brad@Cayman.com			   - from a (yet another) Smith's tune