werner@nikhefk.UUCP (Werner Vogels) (09/26/88)
A friend of mine is working on a port of MINIX to an Apricot PC. He
asked me to try and find out if some part of the work might have been
done already by somebody else somewhere in the world.
The Apricot PC is a non IBM-compatibel 8086-oriented machine. Its hardware
has some similarities with the IBM PC. For example the clock chip is the
same, so is the CRT controller. But the serial interface uses a Z80-SIO
and the floppy disk controller is build around a WD2797. DMA is performed
by a 8089 DMA processor. For these reasons the port is partly done by simply
changing some of the IO-adresses, display memory, etc. The other part
involves rewritting the device dependant parts of the floppy disk task and
the tty task.
His question is: - Is somebody else working on an port to the Apricot PC?
- Has somebody rewritten the floppy disk task to work
with a WD279X for any other machine?
Thanks in advance,
Henk Schouten (Haagse Hogeschool).
Werner Vogels (werner@nikhefk).U448020%HNYKUN11.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Waling Tiersma) (09/27/88)
Being owner of another Apricot machine (FP) I am also very interested in running MINIX on my (portable) micro. I wonder if it would be possible to build an Apricot 'compatible' kernel that uses the Apricot BIOS. I admit that t his would not be the most elegant solution but surely it would be the quickest solution to realize. The advantage of using the Apricot BIOS (ie int 0xFC) would be that the port could run on the whole family of (early) Apricot machines (PC FE F1 FP etc.) Until now I have not realized any of my thoughts (lack of time), but I am planning to do so as quick as possible. ----------------------- Waling Tiersma Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen U448020@HNYKUN11.BITNET
Dickson@pco-multics.hbi.honeywell.com (Paul Dickson) (10/05/88)
> - Has somebody rewritten the floppy disk task to work > with a WD279X for any other machine? My friend, Kevin, and I have written a floppy driver for the WD1797. This isn't the same as the WD2797, but I think they are software compatible. If you want a copy, send me a note. We wrote this for porting Minix to the Slicer, but we haven't tested the code much since the TTY driver still gives us problems. -Paul Dickson Dickson%pco @ BCO-Multics.ARPA Dickson @ BCO-Multics.ARPA