dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) (10/11/88)
The first part of this posting is addressed to people (like myself) who run
minix on a vanilla IBM-PC (4.77MHz, 8088). I finally decided to incorporate
some "known" improvements to the IBM-PC. I am too cheap to go out and buy a
speedup card, so I wanted something I could incorporate myself. The results?
My IBM-PC is almost twice as fast as it was on Friday. The cost? around $20.
The catch? (there's always a catch :-) You have to be pretty competant at
soldering/rework -- this isn't something you can plug in and run. As an
example, a getpid() benchmark I ran on Friday took 126 seconds. On Saturday,
it took 73 (no changes to the code). If anyone is interested, let me know
and I'll post rework instructions. I was going to post this to
comp.sys.ibm.pc as well, but this fix requires a change to MINIX source, and
you can't modify MS-DOS (at least, not easily). Therefore, as far as I'm
concerned, it's specific to MINIX. Ahhh, at last, my system does REAL work.
Secondly, I find it a source of minor annoyance, that some of the MINIX
directories have millions (slight exaggeration :-) of files. I mean, the
source for libc.a could really be split into several directories (just as
BSD does). This way, 'ls' wouldn't die when trying to list the directory.
It seems that an OS designed to run on small systems should not have such
large, unwieldy directories. I would split them myself, but doing this
breaks all the helpful scripts. As a converse to this, it's also a nuisance
that some files are bigger than mined can handle. A classic example, is
the source to mined itself! It has been split into two files. Both of them
are too big to edit. Is there any reason why they couldn't be distributed
as three (or four) files?
OK, while I'm raising points of interest, it would also be nice to know what
the differences to all the system stuff do. I want to bring up the 1.3c
tty driver, but don't want to do the whole 1.3c stuff just yet. Unfortunately,
I have no idea what changed, so I can tell if the system will work with the
advanced driver.
Finally, Andy, I got the Rijkdaalder -- Thanks!
- Der
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Reply: dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan @ Tynan Computers)
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