jk0@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Jason Coughlin) (04/23/89)
Could someone please email a few specs on the Atari ST? I'm considering buying one and the ST Minix. (A) How much memory can be put in the sucker? (B) Does it have protection hardware? (C) What is the max size of a process under Minix? (D) What HD, CRT would you suggest? Thanks. -- Jason Coughlin ( jk0@sun.soe.clarkson.edu , jk0@clutx , or whatever suits your fancy )
stailey@iris613.gsfc.nasa.gov (Ken Stailey) (04/23/89)
In article <2905@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> jk0@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Jason Coughlin) writes: > > Could someone please email a few specs on the Atari ST? I'm >considering buying one and the ST Minix. > > (A) How much memory can be put in the sucker? > the "mmu" chip limits you to 4 meg. > (B) Does it have protection hardware? > not right out of the box > (C) What is the max size of a process under Minix? as much as can fit in core (no virtual memory at all) > > (D) What HD, CRT would you suggest? there are 2 monitors from Atari: SM124: 640x400 monochrome (paper white J.L.T.M [just like the mac]) SC1224: (320low/640med)x200 color (dual resolutions more color in low) Moniterm makes a bigger mono and I've seen pictures of bigger color ones so you should hunt around in magazines. > > Thanks. >-- >Jason Coughlin >( jk0@sun.soe.clarkson.edu , jk0@clutx , or whatever suits your fancy ) *========================================================================* { what opinions?!? what disclaimer !?!?! ken@all.over.the.place } *========================================================================*
kirkenda@psueea.uucp (Steve Kirkendall) (04/24/89)
In article <2905@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> jk0@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Jason Coughlin) writes: > Could someone please email a few specs on the Atari ST? I'm >considering buying one and the ST Minix. There seems to be a lot of new interest in Minix, especially on the ST, so I guess the answers are worth posting... > (A) How much memory can be put in the sucker? Four megabytes, without resorting to funny hardware hacks. The Atari addresses two banks of 16 chips; each bank can be composed of either 256k chips or 1M chips, so to have more than 1 meg or RAM, you must use the 1M chips, which are still kinda spendy. > (B) Does it have protection hardware? A little, but not enough. A user process can't access the lower 2k (or so) of RAM, so an attempt to dereference a NULL pointer is trapped. Also, user processes can't access I/O ports, and nothing can access non-existent memory. However, there is nothing to prevent a user process from zapping some other user process, or even most of the kernel. > (C) What is the max size of a process under Minix? Limited only by available memory. Figure about 150k for the kernel, and about 250k for the RAM disk. My system has 1 meg or RAM, of which 550k is "available", and I routinely run processes that need over 400k. > (D) What HD, CRT would you suggest? You should allow at least 15 megabytes for Minix. It will fit in half that much space (complete with source), but you want to allow room for your own stuff, too... As for a particular brand of HD, well, every brand has its fanatics. Some people have had trouble with Atari Megafile 60's. And from other messages: What can I do with Minix? What is it for? Minix is a case-study, presented in Andy Tannenbaum's textbook, "Operating Systems - Design and Implementation". You can use Minix to learn about operating systems. If you don't want to learn about OSes, then tere is little reason for you to get Minix. Does it Multitask like OS-9? Yes. Minix seems somewhat faster (really!) and much more reliable than OS-9, and you get source code and a compiler, for a lot less money. Can I run Atari ST programs on it? No. But you can partition your hard disk and use one prtition for GEM and the other for Minix, so it's not all-or-nothing. Are all the UNIX goodies there? No, but a lot of them are, and a lot of P.D. stuff is being ported and posted. Conspicuously absent from the standard Minix-ST are: vi - a PD version called "stevie" has been ported. uucp - a PD version called "uupc" is being ported. rcs or sccs floating point - I think GCC (a PD compiler) has floats lex & yacc - the GNU versions have been ported, I think. Also, the versions of commands that you do get are generally pretty limited. E.g., `ls` can't list filenames in multiple columns, and `tar` can't split archives across multiple volumes. Fortunately, we all have source code... How fast is Minix? Compared to what? The compiler is slow, but not prohibitively so. System calls have a high overhead, but that really only affects unbuffered I/O. Minix is fast enough to be useful, but nobody is going to say "Wow! Look at that thing go!" How similar is Minix to Unix? It's easy to port programs from Unix to Minix. Minix is meant to resemble version 7 Unix. Version 7 was the last common ancestor between BSD 4.3 and System V. Generally, it is easier to port BSD programs than SysV programs, because SysV uses a different set of ioctl() calls for controlling the console and serial lines. The internal structure of the Minix kernel is entirely different from that of any "real" Unix system. Unix was written for efficiency; Minix was written for understandability and ease of modification. -- Steve Kirkendall uunet!tektronix!psu-cs!kirkenda
ugkamins@sunybcs.uucp (John Kaminski) (04/24/89)
In article <1071@psueea.UUCP> kirkenda@jove.cs.pdx.edu (Steve Kirkendall) writes:
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=> The internal structure of the Minix kernel is entirely different from that
=> of any "real" Unix system. Unix was written for efficiency; Minix was
=> written for understandability and ease of modification.
=>
=>-- Steve Kirkendall
=> uunet!tektronix!psu-cs!kirkenda
not to mention modularity, so that if you wanted, you could have the file
system handled on another machine (distributed environment). The only problem
to be solved is writing the message sender and receiver for communication
to/from the remote server.