Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!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.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: preloading programs
Message-ID: <188@obie.UUCP>
Date: 28 Apr 88 06:12:30 GMT
References: <8804141742.AA01455@decwrl.dec.com> <693@ast.cs.vu.nl> <390@uvicctr.UUCP>
Organization: Great Salt Lake Yacht Club, north branch
Lines: 25
Summary: Preloading programs is difficult on TOS...

In article <390@uvicctr.UUCP>, collinge@uvicctr.UUCP (Doug Collinge) writes:
> Someone said that OS9 68k is capable of "preloading" commands; that is,
> loading some programs into memory and executing them there when invoked
> rather than loading them from disk.  This seems to be yet another
> excellent idea incorporated in OS9 that no-one else seems to have
> thought of.

Yes, that is one of the many good features of OS9.  Another is
pre-loaded modules.  You can have "external" modules on OS9 - when
your program calls such a module, the OS looks to see if it is in
memory.  If not, it searches for it in the current execution
directory, and loads it.  The OS manages the module tables all by
itself.  You can, of course, pre-load modules.  Nice feature.

> How difficult would it be to hack this into Gulaam?

Probably VERY difficult.  TOS is not setup to handle pre-loaded
programs; whenever a program exits (via the Pterm or Pterm0 sys
calls), the OS unloads all of the memory allocated to the program,
including the text segment.  This would be difficult to hack around.
-- 
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