Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: A few novice questions
Message-ID: <1988Nov9.184419.3709@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <8811081753.AA18094@decwrl.dec.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 88 18:44:19 GMT

In article <8811081753.AA18094@decwrl.dec.com> powers@cimbad.dec.com (Bill Powers) writes:
>     ... Are there standard system calls in most unix systems
>     for doing graphics/windowing functions, which something like X-Windows
>     relies on using, or how is their functionality usually achieved?

Ha ha ha ho ho ho.  There is nothing even remotely standard about the way
graphics and windowing work under Unix; it's different every time.

>  3) If I spawn a couple of processes from a program, is their a mechanism
>     for one process to send stuff to another process, like mailboxes in
>     VMS.

Pipes.

>  4) In the atari implementation, are the processes protected from blasting
>     one another, or the kernel? ...

I'm not intimately familiar with ST Minix (yet), but the ST basically has
essentially no protection hardware, so the answer is almost certainly "no".
The ST has some sort of tweak for protecting low core, but that's *all*
it can do.

>  5) Are there any particular reasons why the minix couldn't keep the 
>     heep, and processes can take as much of it as is available, instead
>     of each process having a separate stack/heap area, which is I believe
>     how it works now.

The semantics of the sbrk() system call require a contiguous heap for
each process.
-- 
The Earth is our mother.        |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Our nine months are up.         |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu