sreiz@cs.vu.nl (=Steven Reiz) (10/22/90)
Sorry for the loud subject line, but I posted this last week and got 0
(yes zero) responses to it, so i'm reposting it, slightly modified.
Recent amigas (A500s and A2000s with a 1MB agnus and A3000s) can have
(chip) memory in the $080000 - $100000 range and I just discovered that
minix has a bit of a problem with that...
In fact on those machines it will add the screen memory and the disk buffers
to the free memory list. This means that if you execute a small minix program,
like ls, it will trash the disk buffers, and if you execute a large program,
or a program with a large data segment, like diskcopy, it will trash the
diskbuffers and the screen memory.
Indeed some people have reported exactly those problems: disk errors when
using various small programs and diskcopy messing up the screen.
If you had minix trashing your floppies too, please try the quick&dirty fix
that is explained below. It will let minix think that your machine does
not have memory at $080000 - $0c0000:
Change your BOOT:s/startup-sequence, which should currently be:
BOOT:c/assign devs: BOOT:devs
BOOT:c/setmap m_usa1
BOOT:Minix -s 0 -e $200
to:
BOOT:c/assign devs: BOOT:devs
BOOT:c/setmap m_usa1
BOOT:Minix -s 0 -e $200 -n $080000
Note that I assume here that you have 'installed' the BOOT disk.
Please let me know if this fix works or not!
You can email your findings to amiga@cs.vu.nl or sreiz@cs.vu.nl.
If you do not receive email back from me within two days saying that
I received your mail, could you please post your findings to this newsgroup?
I hope to prevent tens (hundreds? thousands?) of postings saying
'yes, it worked' or 'no, it !@#$% didn't work for me!' in this way
that are totally of no interest to most readers of this newsgroup.
I will summarize to the net as soon as possible.
Unfortunately the code that causes the bug is part of the minix kernel, not
the loader, so a proper fix will require a new version of minix.img.
When I am sure how this bugfix works out I will recompile minix.img and
post it.
Please let us know of any other problems that you have with minix as well!
Regards,
Steven Reizguineau@wjg.enet.dec.com (W. John Guineau) (10/23/90)
In article <8009@star.cs.vu.nl>, sreiz@cs.vu.nl (=Steven Reiz) writes: |> From: sreiz@cs.vu.nl (=Steven Reiz) |> Newsgroups: comp.os.minix |> Subject: AMIGAMINIX USERS: READ THIS! |> |> Sorry for the loud subject line, but I posted this last week and got 0 |> (yes zero) responses to it, so i'm reposting it, slightly modified. Hi Stephen, FWIW I never saw your original posting so maybe it got eaten by something. I'm hoping this also fixes a strange behaviour that's keeping some of us from getting a 030 compatible image working... |> Regards, |> |> Steven Reiz |> -- W. John Guineau guineau@wjg.enet.dec.com Digital Equipment Corporation wjg@wpi.wpi.edu Marlboro MA. 01752