Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: 68030 box, Cringely, Comdex
Message-ID: <5189@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 7 Nov 88 22:06:39 GMT
References: <722@faui10.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 34

>> From my understanding, it will be Helios, which is far from UNIX.  (this
>> move to select Helios seems to show the importance of the European
>> market, that is what is equivilent there to our UNIX here).  Can anyone
> 			  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> comment on this?

> 	I will: Helios is just a UNIX look-alike, it isn't equivalent to
> it (in my view). Why? Well, essentially, it's been designed to run on a
> network of transputers and not the 68030! 

That's just scratching the surface.  Perhaps the most important difference
between Helios and UNIX is that all implementations of UNIX, by definition,
use MMUs for protection, so that errant code in one application can't 
clobber other applications or the kernel.  Helios can't offer any inherent
protection, since Transputers don't.  Of course, it may be difficult for
a process on Transputer A to clobber a process on Transputer B, but adding
one Transputer per process is about the only way you can get real protection,
which is pretty ugly.

> Thus, Helios for the Atari could perhaps be compared to Mach (-> NeXT,
> comp.sys.next) which *is* a *tightly coupled* multiprocessor system.

The current Mach kernel on the NeXT machine is supposedly the more mature Mach
kernel, the one without multiprocessor support.  However, Mach was designed
for tightly coupled multiprocessing, and certainly one would expect NeXT to
eventually offer that version of the kernel, perhaps when it's fully working
and NeXT has additional CPU modules to add into their box.

>> Aric Friesen
> 	Dirk Husemann
-- 
Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: D-DAVE H     BIX: hazy
              Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession