Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!im4u!ut-sally!utah-cs!utah-gr!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wes
From: wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: The Amiga Port
Message-ID: <125@obie.UUCP>
Date: 8 Apr 88 04:20:43 GMT
References: <1483@louie.udel.EDU> <343@wsccs.UUCP> <1781@sugar.UUCP> <2390@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>
Organization: the Well of Souls
Lines: 34
Summary: ST Minix -> Amiga; that's what I had in mind.

In article <2390@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>, cyliax@ea.ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax) writes:
> How is that?  The Atari does not have any mapping registers. I assume
> that Minix for the ST will relocate the program at start-up, much like
> it does for GEM/TOS. I would expect people to come up with a native
> port to the Amiga soon after Minix-St is available.

Yah, I wondered about this "mapping of logical address 0" too.
Actually, the ST does *not* have this feature, and with the Amiga, you
can have it if you want to.  I think the Blitter is actually capable
of grabbing memory reads/writes from the CPU and redirecting them.
Hmm... virtual Minix on the Amiga?  *WAAAYYYY* over my head
(currently).  I'm not sure I want to know *that* much about the Amiga,
but it is an interesting idea.  I assume the Minix loader will
generate a load module with chained 'fixup words', perhaps Mr. 
Tanenbaum, or one of the other kind folk at CWI, can answer this
question for us.

> If I had an Amiga, I would certainly be interested enough to run Minix
> on it, to even try porting it myself. It would also be relativly easy to
> have the same load format and syscall interface for both the Amiga and
> Atari so you could actually run the same binary on it. And as soon
> as we have X :-), we could also have a standard windowing system for both
> of them.

I don't, but terry@wsccs does - with a 20 meg hard disk.  I have a 1
meg 520ST with 2x20 meg hard disk (when I get Minix, it will be 2x20).
The common load format is just common sense, and the syscall interface
should be *exactly* the same - there is no reason to change any of
that code!
-- 
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