Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast@cs.vu.nl
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Bruce Evans' opus
Message-ID: <2570@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 22 May 89 06:36:00 GMT
Sender: ast@cs.vu.nl
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 24


Bruce Evans has clearly done a great deal of high quality work in his recent
giant posting and I am sure many people are interested in it.  Furthermore,
I hate to be a party pooper, but...

According to P-H's sales figures, the PC version of MINIX is still outselling
the AT version by a wide margin.  This means that there are a lot of 8088s
still out there.  Consequently, I am going to base V2.x on 1.4a, not on Bruce's
version.  I just don't want all that extra complexity on the 8088 (remember,
the goal was a teaching system).

This means that if you convert to Bruce's system now, you may have trouble
converting to 2.x (POSIX-based) later.  It is clearly up to you which way you
go, but at least you should be aware that there is a fork in the road here.

The long term plan for MINIX is to wait until not only the 8088, but the 286 
has also vanished, and make MINIX 3.x (probably in 4 or 5 years) entirely
a 386/486/585/686/786 based system, assuming these are all architecturally 
compatible.  The 286's dwarf segments are a real nuisance, and hardly
compatible with the Atari, Amiga, and other versions of MINIX in progress,
whereas on the 386 one can use a single 32-bit segment (Motorola mode) and
implement that fairly cleanly.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)