nemossan@uitec.ac.jp (Sakurao NEMOTO) (12/13/90)
In MINIX-1.5, experiences on porting it into various machines are effec- tively utilized, thus we can use MINIX in various environments, even some- times tiny patchs may be necessary. But, in Japan, best-seller personal-machines are NEC-PC9801-series, which are _NOT_ IBM-compatible, and high percentage of personal-computer-users in Japan use them. These machines use Intel's 80x86-CPU, and use resembled peripheral chips of IBM-PCs,thus porting minix into them are tried from the time of MINIX- 1.2. In NIKKEI-MIX, commercial BBS in Japan and sister BBS of BIX in the US., we are making information exchanges on MINIX, and we are trying to port MINIX into non-IBM-compatible machines, ex PC9801. Now, at the time Dec. 3, 1990, portings to NEC-PC9801 are posted there until version-1.5-gamma- 001, and next version, gamma-002 will be shown soon. Porting MINIX into NEC machines, here,are made according to the guidlines of satisfaction specifications of original IBM-PC-verion as much as possible, except by the limitations of Hardware-restrictions. Furthermore, several expansions are made utilizing hardware/firmware functions of them. Here, I'd like to introduce these extensions. 1) Addition of SCSI-drivers In NEC-PC-9801, conventional SASI interfaced HDD and recently employed SCSI drivers used widely. In MINIX-1.5-PC98, we instal- led direct-Access-type SCSI device driver for Hard-disks and Magneto-Optical-drives. Thus both SACI and SCSI drives can be ac- cessed at the same time, resulting easy system-expansion. 2) Booting from Hard-disk/MO-disk In NEC-PC9801, menu program is provided in the initial boot area for Hard-disks,which enables selection of several OSs in the Hard- disk, and booting from the corresponding OSs. Using this menu- program and auxial program in MS-DOS, we can boot-up MINIX both from Floppy-disks and Hard-disks (including MO-disks) with the same kernel. When booted from HD/MO, booting partition is auto- matically set as root-file-system, thus ramdisk can be used as /tmp. 3) Many machines of NEC-PC9801 have Graphic-Video-Ram, usually two- planes of 96-kB (depends of types), which is usually not used in MINIX, thus MINIX-1.5-NEC utilizes one-plane of GVRAM as MAIN memory,avoiding memory shortage for real-mode-environment of 8086- CPUs, etc. 4) two-byte-code displaying In Japan, we are necessary to display Japanese-Kanji-coded char- acters. MINIX-1.5-NEC can display them. But,it may be restricted only in Japan. Some people report that in Macintosh-version of MINIX-1.5, they have succeeded to display Kanji,and also input Kanji from Mac. In NEC-version, we are trying to do so. Of cource, this situation is a intermediate report of porting MINIX into Japanese machines, and bug-fixing/improvements are still in advance. For another machine, FMR made by Fujitsu and uses 80x86-CPUs, portation is also reported, we hope it will be delivered soon. Thus, MINIX is growing up in the small-country in Far East, too!! >Andy ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Original Japanese, written by takamiti@mix translated by nemossan@mix, nemossan@uitec.ac.jp