wcs@ho95b.UUCP (Bill Stewart) (04/16/85)
I'd like to read a program into memory, do a few other things, and then exec the program. Is there a clean way to do this? (I assume I can do this if I go hack kmem a lot, but I'd rather avoid/minimze that.) Alternatively, unmounting a disk while executing a program that lives on it would do just as well, but UNIX seems to frown on such behaviour. The motivation for this is that I'm ordering a stripped-down VENIX-86 for a two-floppy-disk PC; there's lots of RAM but only two disks, and the user's program and data may not all fit on the non-system-disk floppy. It would be nice to start up a program living on floppy disk 1, (unmount and) switch floopy disks, and run with the user's data disk in drive 1. It doesn't look too hard to hack a program that reads a data file into core, closes the file, unmounts the disk, and sends its output to a pipe, or to do the corresponding program to catch stdout, but the middle part looks tough. Help? Thanks; Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ {ihnp4, allegra, cbosg}!ho95c!wcs P.S. VENIX-86 seems like a nice system. I've played with a hard-disk version, and there was a Data General Portable at UniForum running a two-floppy VENIX, complete with csh and vi.
ron@BRL-TGR.ARPA (Ron Natalie) (04/23/85)
Wouldn't an easier solution be to write a pseudo-device driver that allows you to use some of your memory space as a disk? It works for my IBM-PC at least. -Ron