Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Boot-block contest ( )
Message-ID: <40776@sun.uucp>
Date: 2 Feb 88 19:57:42 GMT
References: <2442@crash.cts.com> <3100@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <150@laic.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 24

In article <150@laic.UUCP> darin@laic.UUCP (Darin Johnson) writes:
> Actually, I would like to see how people use the bootblock.  I have
> been thinking off and on about coming up with my own OS, but always
> forget about it when I think of how to create a boot block, generating
> code that will work there (I assume Lattice/Manx won't work - assembler
> perhaps..), and how to put enough code in the bootblock to actually
> read stuff from the disk to load in the rest of the OS.

So why do you need to change the boot block to read in the O/S? Doing
O/S development on the Amiga is very straightforward, you write your 
kernel in whatever language you propose, write little 'mini boot' that
AllocMem's all of the available memory (or maybe just some big contiguous
chunk) and loads your kernel image into it and starts it. I have seen
several possible ways that MINIX (one of the more popular O/S' since all
of the implementing has already been done) could run as an exec task. 
if you have 2Meg of memory you could even give MINIX it's own 640K address
space and leave the rest for other things. The point here, is that not
being knowledgeable enough to bash on the boot block should not be an
impediment to doing os development on the Amiga. 


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.