sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven) (09/24/90)
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Amiga Minix 1.5:
Q: What are the hardware requirements to run Minix?
A: An amiga with an 68000, 1 MB of ram (or more) and 1 or more
floppy drives.
Note that this does include A2000s and expanded A500s and A1000s
but that it does not include amigas with 680x0s where x>0, sorry.
Q: What kind of multitasking does Minix provide?
A: Pre-emptive multitasking, just like Unix and the normal AmigaOS.
This means that the programmer doesn't have to do anything special
to make his program multitasking.
Q: What floppy format does Minix use?
A: Minix uses (of course) the normal 880 KB diskdrives but uses the same
format as the atari ST: double sided, 80 cylinders and 9 sectors/track.
This gives a capacity of 720 KB per disk and full compatibility with
ST minix, most of the disks in the atari and amiga distribution of
minix are identical. The PC minix 3.5" disk format is very much like
the amiga/atari format but not yet fully compatible. They will be in
the future.
Q: What about Amiga Minix harddisk support?
A: There isn't any yet. We didn't have a harddisk to test it on, so we
couldn't develop it. The source of the atari harddisk driver is included
to make it easier to write your own harddisk driver.
Q: How hard is it to add a harddisk driver?
A: When you have detailed information about your harddisk controller
it's not very hard. What you need to know is which addresses your
harddisk controller occupies and what the protocol is to make your
controller read and write blocks of data. Armed with this information
you can easily adapt the atari driver.
Q: Is there a program to convert amiga executables to run them under minix?
A: No, not even in the sense that you could compile a minix program together
with the minix libraries with a normal amiga compiler and then convert it
to run under minix, but this special kind of conversion would indeed be
very useful and it is relatively easy to write a program to do it.
Q: Can I run the normal AmigaOS and minix at the same time?
A: No. This version of Amiga Minix takes over the computer completely.
This allowed us to stay very close to the PC and atari versions which
do just the same. It would be very neat to have minix and AmigaOS windows
side by side, seeing minix commands and normal amiga commands being
executed side by side, but this would have a very definite drawback:
A version of amiga minix that would allow this would have very different
sourcecode from the atari and st versions, large parts of the kernel and
memory manager would have to be dumped or rewritten, and probably parts
of the filesystem as well. That way it would be practically impossible
to use amiga minix for teaching OS courses because lots of interesting
low level stuff like task scheduling would have to be done by Exec.
Q: Does minix provide a graphical user interface (gui) or other sound and
graphics capabilities?
A: No, you should view amiga minix as providing you with a totally different
machine: you can use the amiga in the normal way with its windows,
graphics and sound OR you can boot minix. Amiga (and atari and PC) minix
are very similar to using a 80x25 ASCII terminal connected to a mini running
V7 unix, providing you with the elegance and flexibility of familiar *nix
utilities like grep and sed or familiar *nix system calls like fork and
execv, but unfortunately no sound capabilities beyond a beep when you press
^G.
It would be very nice to have a gui but it would have to meet some very
tough demands:
- the sourcecode would have to be public domain
- it should be portable to the amiga, atari and PC
- it should not be to big to run on a 1 MB machine
If anybody would want to port for example the X windowing system to amiga
minix he/she of course is very welcome to do so, but I don't think too many
people will ever be able to run something like that because of the high
(extreme?) demands this places on the speed of the processor and the size
of the harddisk and ram.
Q: What software can be run under amiga minix?
A: A load of familiar unix utilities (most with source!) are supplied with
minix and other unix programs can be ported far more easily to minix than
to the normal AmigaOS. Amiga-specific programs that use for example the
intuition library for graphics will probably never run under minix.
Q: How about the serial port?
A: The amiga serial port is supported under minix, you can use kermit and
zmodem and other terminal programs and even connect a terminal or other
computer to the amiga to provide you with a true multi-user system!
(Currently limited to 2-user because amigas have only one serial port,
support for multiserial boards is probably not very hard to add.)
Q: How good is amiga minix compared to pc and st minix 1.5?
A: I am not sure about the pc version but it is equivalent to the st version
minus harddisk support.
Steven ReizGWO110%URIACC.BITNET@brownvm.brown.edu (F. Michael Theilig) (09/25/90)
On 24 Sep 90 14:53:31 GMT you said: >Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Amiga Minix 1.5: > >Q: What are the hardware requirements to run Minix? >A: An amiga with an 68000, 1 MB of ram (or more) and 1 or more > floppy drives. > Note that this does include A2000s and expanded A500s and A1000s > but that it does not include amigas with 680x0s where x>0, sorry. > Does this mean it won't work on a 68010? [Stuffus deletus] >Q: How about the serial port? >A: The amiga serial port is supported under minix, you can use kermit and > zmodem and other terminal programs and even connect a terminal or other > computer to the amiga to provide you with a true multi-user system! > (Currently limited to 2-user because amigas have only one serial port, > support for multiserial boards is probably not very hard to add.) > Will DNet compile under Minix? > > Steven Reiz -------- F. Michael Theilig - The University of Rhode Island at Little Rest GKZ117 at URIACC.Bitnet GWO110 at URIACC.Bitnet "Magic work much better when there be bullets in the gun, asshole!"
sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven) (09/25/90)
GWO110%URIACC.BITNET@brownvm.brown.edu (F. Michael Theilig) writes: >On 24 Sep 90 14:53:31 GMT you said: (Steven Reiz, that's me) >>Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Amiga Minix 1.5: >>Q: What are the hardware requirements to run Minix? >>A: An amiga with an 68000, 1 MB of ram (or more) and 1 or more >> floppy drives. >> Note that this does include A2000s and expanded A500s and A1000s >> but that it does not include amigas with 680x0s where x>0, sorry. >> > Does this mean it won't work on a 68010? My own amiga has a 68010 (wauw!, a 5% speedup :-) and I did test minix on it. It was a couple of months ago and i'm pretty sure that i tested a prerelease version, so i'm not 100% sure of this but as i remember minix did boot fine and worked all right until an address error occured. (This can for example be produced by compiling and executing main() { *(short *)1=0; } ) Using an 68000, minix catches the trap, kills the program and produces something like 'memory fault - core dumped'. An 68010 saves a different (larger) exception frame on the stack for address errors. This causes minix to crash. The bottom line is that you could run this version on a 68010 but it would not be as error-resistant as running it on a 68000. You could fix it in the kernel code yourself by having minix pop some more bytes from the stack after certain exceptions have occured then it does now, or you could take out the 68010 and put that good old 68000 back in. This is of course not a very neat solution but it is what I do when I want to minix seriously, the 5% speedup is (in my opinion/case) just a gimmick to impress friends with. > Will DNet compile under Minix? I think that DNet contains lots of DOS-specific stuff (handlers etc) which are user processes under AmigaOS but would have to be incorporated into the minix filesystem (NOT a user process). This would require a major rewrite of DNet, as well as the minix filesystem. I could be totally wrong here because I know next to nothing about DNet. Could someone else comment on this, maybe Matt Dillon himself? >> Steven Reiz > -------- > F. Michael Theilig - The University of Rhode Island at Little Rest > GKZ117 at URIACC.Bitnet > GWO110 at URIACC.Bitnet Steven Reiz
welsh@latcs1.oz.au (Killer T Cells) (09/29/90)
In article <7725@star.cs.vu.nl> sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven) writes: >GWO110%URIACC.BITNET@brownvm.brown.edu (F. Michael Theilig) writes: >> Will DNet compile under Minix? > >I think that DNet contains lots of DOS-specific stuff (handlers etc) which >are user processes under AmigaOS but would have to be incorporated into the >minix filesystem (NOT a user process). This would require a major rewrite of >DNet, as well as the minix filesystem. I could be totally wrong here because >I know next to nothing about DNet. Could someone else comment on this, maybe >Matt Dillon himself? Uh, DNet comes in two parts, one for Amiga, one for UNIX. The question probably means "Will the UNIX side of DNet compile under Minix?". This depends on whether Minix supports sockets. -- |/ | | | < |) ##### His particular sadistic specialty was contumely, |\ | |_ |_ < |\ # which Melissa craved with an abject thirst. # T e e C e l l s # -- Karen Elizabeth Gordon
sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven) (10/01/90)
welsh@latcs1.oz.au (Killer T Cells) writes: >In article <7725@star.cs.vu.nl> sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven) writes: >>GWO110%URIACC.BITNET@brownvm.brown.edu (F. Michael Theilig) writes: >>> Will DNet compile under Minix? >> >Uh, DNet comes in two parts, one for Amiga, one for UNIX. The question >probably means "Will the UNIX side of DNet compile under Minix?". This >depends on whether Minix supports sockets. Minix doesn't support sockets. A fellow student here at the VU is working on implementing TCP/IP under minix but it will probably be a long time before sockets are supported by minix, if ever. Steven Reiz
vodall@hpfcso.HP.COM (Bill Vodall) (10/11/90)
/ hpfcso:comp.sys.amiga / kaufmads@clutx.clarkson.edu (Dana S. Kaufman,TEP House,58520,) / 1:28 pm Oct 1, 1990 / Does Minix run on an Amiga 1000? I don't remember it being listed in earlier posts on this subject. I need it for a class next semester and rather run it on my Amiga than my IBM. Dana S. Kaufman kaufmads@clutx.clarkson.edu ---------- Yes. The Amiga Minix runs on the 1000. I received my copy last night. I did have to rebuild the boot disk as one of the critical files had a read error. Fortunately a backup file was provided. There may be some other gotcha's (the MS-DOS format utility hangs) but so far it looks pretty good. Bill