Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!umd5!uvaarpa!virginia!kesmai!dca
From: dca@kesmai.COM (David C. Albrecht)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga UNIX
Message-ID: <161@kesmai.COM>
Date: 20 Apr 88 19:56:59 GMT
References: <211@laic.UUCP>
Organization: Kesmai Corporation, Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 34

In article <211@laic.UUCP>, darin@laic.UUCP (Darin Johnson) writes:
> Has anyone bothered to think about writing a non-VM unix for the Amiga?
> Buying a 68020/851 card for the 2000 just to run unix seems like a waste
> to me.  Also, if it indeed requires 100Meg disk (and can't be pruned down
> to say... 10Meg) it will indeed be out of my league (I have no problem
> leaving find/uucp/vi/uncompress/etc. on floppy).
> 
> I don't think (could be wrong) that Xenix requires any sort of special
> hardware (or gobs of file space).  Therefore, why is Commodore writing
> a version that will be so expensive to use?  It would be real smart of
> them to write a version that will work with or without the
> extra card.
> -- 

Well, check out your latest Amazing Computing wherein you find an ad for
AMIX a unix-like derivative which as far as I can tell runs on a
stock Amiga.

Personally, I think it was only sensible of Commodore to aim their unix
at the CBM 68020 board market.  It has very little to do with VM it has much
more to do with ability of a MMU to make each process see its memory
space as sequential and allocate memory from a block in that space
while the actual location of that block in real memory is irrelevant.
It makes 'fork' ever so much easier and efficient.  It also pretty
much eliminates the problem of one task bringing down the whole machine
and viruses writing wherever they want on disk (unless you are on root).
If they are really interested in the workstation market, a non-mmu version
just wouldn't cut it.  I expect that mmu and non-mmu versions would be quite
different beasts and I for one would not want to have to simulate 32 bit
arithmetic (or make procedure calls) just so it could support the 68000.
As a separate product maybe (if they thought it worth the effort) as a
unified product, I don't think so.

David Albrecht