Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!CORY.BERKELEY.EDU!dillon
From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Amiga and the MMU (Re: Suggestion for 1.4)
Message-ID: <8806161913.AA16742@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 16 Jun 88 19:13:10 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 22

>things. And that is probably a false hope. Anyway, all I can say is that
>I hope the port to the 68020 with MMU has an option in it to protect a 
>task that a developer writes (RunProtected maybe) so that a developer 
>can be *sure* that his/her program is not doing anything that damages
>the rest of the system. In so doing, the reliability of all Amiga's goes
>up because the code they run is much more well behaved. And the development
>cycle speeds up because those same developers don't have to reboot when 
>their code goes awry.

	The problem isn't necessarily that the task is writing over all
of memory, but that it might be giving standard library routines bogus
arguments.

	Which makes the MMU almost useless unless major argument checking
is put into the library routines, which can be done without using an MMU.
ALL the MMU protects us from is a program stomping over memory it isn't
supposed to stomp over.

	I'm not saying an MMU will catch none of the crashes, just that
it won't catch all of them (if you can make sense out of that!)

						-Matt