[comp.os.minix] The continuing saga...

mpl@sfsup.UUCP (M.P.Lindner) (07/10/87)

Well, only having a couple of hours per evening to work on minx (after all,
I have to earn a living) is hell, but I managed to get a little further.
I got the hard disk fixes for the M24 (AT&T 6300) to compile, and built a
kernel, and made a boot disk.  I also couldn't reproduce the ram disk
problem (which happened consistently before - perhaps the drive was flakey).
So, I have a ram disk any size I want.  So, the problems are:
	1. the kernel is now abysmally slow.  I may buy a C compiler just
	   to see if I can speen it up (or I may hand-optimize, yuck).
	   tty output is noticeably slower.  At least that proves I
	   rebuilt the tty task OK.
	2. the kernel is significantly bigger, so that "cc" will not run
	   without the "-F" option on my 640K pc with a 280K ram disk.
	3. It doesn't look like the hard disk works anyway!  I haven't
	   reformatted and repartitioned the disk yet, as I'm too lazy to
	   make backups until I have to (next week), but the drive light
	   stays on in minix, and if I CNTRL-ALT-DEL, DOS doesn't know
	   about the hard disk until I power down and up again, which is
	   what happened without the hard disk fixes.  Could it be that
	   the code to identify the M24 isn't working, or is this normal
	   for minix to do if it doesn't have a partition mounted?

	   Again, next week I'll be debugging the hardware ID part of
	   wini.c, and let you know.  Anyone who has had experience
	   with this, please save me some time and drop a line.

Mike Lindner
....!ihnp4!attunix!mpl