Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!nsc!voder!berlioz!des
From: des@berlioz (Desmond Young)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Bruce Evans' opus
Summary: TCP-IP under MINIX
Message-ID: <336@blenheim.nsc.com>
Date: 8 Jun 89 19:44:10 GMT
References: <16698@louie.udel.EDU>
Organization: National Semiconductor, Santa Clara
Lines: 53

In article <16698@louie.udel.EDU>, Leisner.Henr@xerox.com (marty) writes:
> I'm pretty impressed by Minix.  GNUos (if it ever appears) won't have a
> chance of ever running on PC XT clones.  Minix seems like a seems which has
> a path from 8086/80286/80386 in a reasonable way if changes are made.   A
> few minor extensions would make  Minix far more usable to me:
>   1) support TCP/IP (I'm not going to ask for XNS) -- i.e. ftp/telnet would
> give it real world usefulness.  I'd be happy to discuss how to do this with
> anyone else interested.
> marty
> ARPA:	leisner.henr@xerox.com
> GV:  leisner.henr
> NS:  martin leisner:wbst139:xerox
> UUCP:  hplabs!arisia!leisner

Well....,
  I have Phil Karn's TCP-IP (NET) package running under MINIX. But, I have
not posted it for the following reasons:
 1. Only the original Version 1.000000 software will compile in 64K code,
    the MINIX compiler is AWFUL.
 2. I have written the Ethernet driver for the National Semiconductor
    DP839EB (Evaluation Board for the DP8390 chipset).
 3. The driver, and MINIX is lower performance than I would like.

Now,
  The DP8390 Ethernet Controller is the chip set used in MOST PC cards, that's
the good news. For example, the WD Etherplus uses our chipset, later 3com
boards do, lots of clones do. In fact the amoeba code with MINIX is written
for this set.
  Now the bad news. Our Eval board uses the two on-board dma channels on the
DP8390 to implement remotely-accessed shared memory. The WD board uses dual-
ported shared memory. However, it should be even easier to have it talk to
our set on the WD card than the EB.
  I have taken the V1.0 NET package and put it a load of the "BEST" features
from some later versions of NET. For example, I have added the rmdir, mkdir,
chdir, into FTP. I have also added access permissions, host file address
lookup, and so on. So, NET is pretty usefull.
  I stopped work on it since MINIX was so awful at interrupts it was not
possible to write a REALLY high performance driver (I am picky). If anyone
is really interested I could give you a copy on a 1.2M floppy.
  The Ethernet driver could be made to support the 3c500 also. This is the
NET packages usual card (but god it is awful).
  Anyway, many thanks to Phil Karn, KA9q, and other contributors, the package
is really great. Almost all the problems I had were MINIX, not NET. Also
thanks to Ed Hall, he sent me the V1.0 source he had got working with SLIP
under MINIX.
  One last point, NET effectively polls all servers and clients, so it runs
stand-alone on your machine. It does offer multiple sessions, so for example,
I run the echo, discard, telnet, mail, and ftp servers, and offer up to
four clients when I am running NET. The executable (with debugging) is now
about 55+KBytes, so I cannot add much more to it (it really needs the mailer
upgrading).
  Sorry about raving on,
Cheers, Des.