K312240@AEARN.BITNET (Klaus Kusche) (02/22/90)
Dear Mailing List: Are there any experiences, tips, tricks, ... for sharing a B004/B008 compatible transputer board (with or without DMA to the PC) hosted by a 386 PC compatible and running DOS-based transputer software between multiple users using IGC's VM/386 Multiuser DOS multitasker? More specifically: * Is it possible to access the transputer from within VM/386? * Does VM/386 know about transputer boards? Does it have to know about them? I.e. must I write a VM device driver for it (and is it possible to write one?), or may I access the board without a specific device driver? * Is it possible to make the board a device which can be allocated and released on demand by individual users? More important, is the board protected from access by other users while allocated by a user? If I have several boards on different I/O addresses, may I use them as independent devices? Is there any other software which might do the same trick (i.e. sharing one transputer board between many users on one PC)? The reason for my question: VM/386 seems to be by far the cheapest method (both in hardware and software) to provide multi-user DOS facilities with shared files, and we are considering it for our transputer students lab. Many thanks in advance for any help! ************************************************************************ * Klaus Kusche * * Research Institute for Symbolic Computation * * Johannes Kepler University Tel: +43 7236 3231 67 * * A-4040 Linz Telex: (Austria) 22323 uni li a * * Austria (Europe) Fax: +43 7236 3231 30 * * * * Bitnet: K312240@AEARN * * Arpa/CS/Internet: K312240%AEARN.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU * * UUCP: mcvax!aearn.bitnet!K312240 * * Janet: k312240@earn.aearn or k312240%aearn@earn-relay * ************************************************************************
abbott@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (Ben Abbott) (02/24/90)
My 386 PC / Transputer host is shared by 3 Students along with myself.
The approach I use follows:
We use ix-386 Unix with the VPIX dos shell. (This allow multiple DOS sessions)
The final system is such that each user finds a machine on campus
and then gets on the 386 via rlogin.
Then he moves to the DOS/VPIX environment. If the Transputer is available
he gets it. If not, he may only compile (LSC is a cross compiler) and
keep trying to get the transputer. The rule is to only give yourself
access to the transputer while running a program. So yes, we share it,
but only one program runs at a time.
I only have one b008 but am positive that multiple cards
could be used in the same fashion. Each being fought for.
Under VPIX: control access of devices is quite easy and requires no programming.
(Just run through some menus)
VPIX handles the issues of physical memory/io address coordination.
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Another approach I have used was to stay only in unix.
I wrote my first unix device driver (a massive hack) to support the
transputer as a unix device. I ported the LSC stuff to unix as well (actually
this required simply copying the source to unix setting some
switches and running make -- Thanks K.B.).
I do not have the kids work from this environment due to documentation
differences. It is quite easy to put together a unix device driver to support
multiple boo8 cards (but I have not done it -- I only have one interface card).
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I hope it helps.
Ben Abbott
Vanderbilt Univ.