kenc@vaxb.acs.unt.edu (03/14/91)
What's this rumor that Amoeba is being ported? I've references to it twice today, and it's got me REAL curious. I thought that Amoeba was a generic distributed processing-type environment. Does this mean that, (assuming we can hook 'em together), several different makes of computers...(Mac,Atari,Amiga,Mess-Dos)...could share in computational tasks on a large scale? Is the code transportable? (Is it available at all? grin) I've ftped the papers Andy, I'll be getting the book on it today. This sounds (so far) like a Good Thing. I'm wondering...what are the prices of each of the nodes on your test setup? (More specifically, would it be feasible with mondo-cheap processors? Got to start thinking of good projects...directed studies are *also* Good Things.) Heck, for that matter, would cheap processors be worth putting together, or are higher-power processors required? (I'm thinking 6502/8086/possibly 68000. What kind of resource drain would this put on a system? Think it'd be possible to run this at 115K baud, or does it just _demand_ ethernet? | Ken Corey aka... kenc@vaxb.acs.unt.edu | | "We MUST succeed, otherwise we run the risk of failure...." | | -Dan Quayle |
ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (03/15/91)
In article <1991Mar14.133523.45833@vaxb.acs.unt.edu> kenc@vaxb.acs.unt.edu writes: >What's this rumor that Amoeba is being ported? I've references to it twice >today, and it's got me REAL curious. > I thought that Amoeba was a generic distributed processing-type environment. Amoeba is a standalone distributed operating system. It does not work with, under, over, or in any way with other operating systems. It is designed at making a collection of, say, 50 high-end workstations, each with at least 4M, and one of which has at least 16M, into a single transparent system. It is the opposite end of the spectrum from MINIX. There is no way Amoeba will ever run on anything tiny, like a single 4M Atari. A minimum useful configuration would be 5 Sun-3s, four of which have 4M and one of which has 16M. A 200M disk would be nice. For more about Amoeba, ftp to ftp.cs.vu.nl and look in pub/amoeba. There is a READ_ME file there that describes about 1000 pages of material on Amoeba that is located there for FTPing. A first beta tape of Amoeba will be available real soon now. Amoeba is copyrighted software, like MINIX, but will be available to universities for a modest fee, probably 500 ECU (about $700). It is not expected that private individuals will have the necessary equipment to run it. Amoeba will be available under commercial terms to companies, including complete support (for a fee, of course). We are working closely with a Dutch software company, ACE, which has 15 years experience in the UNIX business. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)
waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org (Fred 'The Rebel' van Kempen) (03/22/91)
kenc@vaxb.acs.unt.edu () wrote: > What's this rumor that Amoeba is being ported? I've references to it twice > today, and it's got me REAL curious. $ amoeba amoeba-for-minix: No such rumour or project. > I thought that Amoeba was a generic distributed processing-type environment. Correct. > Does this mean that, (assuming we can hook 'em together), several different > makes of computers...(Mac,Atari,Amiga,Mess-Dos)...could share in computational > tasks on a large scale? Is the code transportable? (Is it available at all? > grin) If you have a room full of _large_ machines (4 to 8 Sun's at least), you can use Amoeba OS. > I've ftped the papers Andy, I'll be getting the book on it today. This > sounds (so far) like a Good Thing. I'm wondering...what are the prices of each > of the nodes on your test setup? (More specifically, would it be feasible with > mondo-cheap processors? Got to start thinking of good projects...directed > studies are *also* Good Things.) Heck, for that matter, would cheap processors You need at least 4 to 8 machines with an iNTEL 386 or Motorola 68030, one machine with 16M RAM (Bullet File Server), a fast Ethernet, and some workstations. Not fun, if you are "just playing around" ... > be worth putting together, or are higher-power processors required? (I'm > thinking 6502/8086/possibly 68000. Forget it. > What kind of resource drain would this put on a system? Think it'd be > possible to run this at 115K baud, or does it just _demand_ ethernet? 115K? You must be joking. Nope, Ethernet is the least. In Amoeba OS, _all_ is done using the Ethernet. So.... I think this misunderstanding is caused by the term "amoeba" in context with MINIX discussions... let me try to clear up this foggy situation :-) MINIX support several forms of networking: 1. Serial line communications. This can be login/getty, data communications using programs like term(1), xcomm(1) or kermit(1), possibly with file transfer support like Zmodem. 2. Ethernet. MINIX has a driver for the Western Digital Etherplus card (WD8003), so it is possible to write programs that use it. To make life sim- pler (network programming _can_ be a real pain in the *ss!), Andy supplied a simplified version of the RPC protocol that is used in the Amoeba distributed OS. This RPC is easy to use (only 4 user- callable routines!), _fast_ (exteremely fast, I might say), and, what is also very nice, Amoeba RPC can do "networking" with the client and the server on the SAME machine. This allows for network experiments, even when there's no Ethernet around... So, when MINIX is being discussed, we talk about "Amoeba", but we actually mean "the Amoeba OS RPC protocol". This caused the above confusion :-) I have done _a_lot_ with Amoeba RPC the past years, and I like it a lot. I wrote file servers, name servers (for the MUGNET router), desktop interfaces, window servers, the lot, all of them used the Amoeba RPC for some reason.... Since Amoeba is actually very system-independent, I thought it should be running as a separate server process (AMOEBA), instead of running in kernel space. This cleans the kernel from lots of awful hacks, and it will make the stuff available for Motorola systems. This Transaction Server will only use Ethernet if it can find an Ethernet device driver (which, of course, _is_ in kernel space). The new Ethernet driver is purely message-based, so people can write their own network protocol servers on top of it. Alternatively, we might be able to write a serial link protocol (similar to SLIP) that can be used to form a slow Amoeba RPC network..... Oh yeah: all AMOEBA system calls (yeah, all 3 of 'em) now go straight to AMOEBA; MM is no longer used as a system call interfacer... Fred. -- MicroWalt Corporation, for MINIX Development waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org Tel (+31) 252 230 205, Hoefbladhof 27, 2215 DV VOORHOUT, The Netherlands