robinson@shadow.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (01/31/87)
[Will MINIX have a line-eater?]
I have giving some thought recently to the future configuration of my Amiga
(CPU, OS, mass storage, etc.). In particular, I was thinking about the
inevitable port of MINIX to the Amiga.
I, along with thousands of Amiga owners, was very excited when I first learned
of MINIX. My head was immediately filled with thoughts of having unixness
on my own computer.
But further contemplation yielded the following thoughts:
Why does everyone want to run MINIX? Because it's like UNIX, of course!
But why does everyone want to run UNIX? Hmm....
Well, there are basically three reasons to want to run UNIX (maybe four):
1. It is what we're all used to. It would mean the same environment at
home and at work.
2. UNIX is very flexible, and as a result, very powerful.
3. There are ten jillion useful programs out there that run under UNIX,
most of them public domain.
(4. Admit it. Prestige.)
People don't want MINIX because it has underlying similarities to UNIX; it
simply doesn't. In fact, it seems that underneath, MINIX more closely
resembles AmigaDOS than UNIX.
People want to run MINIX because it has the look and feel of their favorite
environment, and because UNIX software will work with it.
But on the other hand, there are some disadvantages to MINIX:
1. Almost everyone agrees that it is not adequate as distributed, which
will inevitably lead to a hodgepodge of nonstandard ports, patches and
hacks. Centralized processing will only alleviate, not eliminate, the
problem. Look at the confusion with different versions of Amiga
software, where you have centrally distributed, official releases.
2. Running MINIX will require maintaining two different environments for
the Amiga. One for the UNIX-like software that runs under MINIX, and
one for the Amiga software, which is specially designed to take
advantage of the Amiga's unique hardware.
Two sets of floppies, or two partitions on the hard drive. Either
way, you never get entirely away from AmigaDOS.
3. Software will still require porting to MINIX. MINIX is an incomplete
implementation of version 7 UNIX. Much of the software in the public
domain assumes a complete 4.? or Sys V.? implementation.
MINIX only really has three claims to unixness:
1. It comes with a number of common UNIX utilities.
2. It comes with a UNIX-like shell.
3. It supports many common UNIX system calls.
So my idea, the point of all this, is to make AmigaDOS look like UNIX. If
MINIX can look like UNIX, there should be no real reason why AmigaDOS can't.
If this were done, one would have all the advantages of MINIX (except source
to the kernel), without all the disadvantages. Unix and AmigaDOS software
living and running side-by-side in the same environment.
By now, it is quite obvious that porting UNIX software to the Amiga is
often trivial. There is a constantly growing library of public domain UNIX
software available for the Amiga. This is due largely to the heroic efforts
of compilers (Manx in particular) to duplicate UNIX system calls in runtime
libraries.
Due to the heroic efforts of Matt Dillon and others, there are UNIX-like
shells that look increasingly like the real thing.
It seems to me that the only thing necessary for a UNIX environment on the
Amiga, that is even more free than MINIX, is a (loosely) organized and
(loosely) coordinated effort to duplicate the environment, with duplication
as the explicit goal. This would be somewhat along the lines of the GNU
project, but would have a tremendous head start in that we already have an
operating system (the hard part). In fact, much of the software generated
by the GNU project would be easily ported to the Amiga.
Certainly there are enough willing and competent programmers out there to
make this work.
Comments?
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"If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics,
You will find that their minds rarely move in a line"
Fifty percent of everything is below average.
Mike Robinson USENET: ucbvax!ernie!robinson
ARPA: robinson@ernie.berkeley.edu