GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) (09/05/88)
I'm not aware of any ports of Minix to the Rainbow world, but there was one made to the IBM PC family. It came out sometime in early 1987, cost around $75, and was distributed with source code by Prentice Hall. The author is Andy Tanenbaum, minix@cs.vu.nl. You might contact him for information about Minix for other machines. If nothing exists for the Rainbow, you'd probably have to add your own code for i/o. It might be useful to contact Richard Thomson, rgt@lanl.gov, who has made changes to the Rainbow BIOS in order to add IBM PC data compability to RX50 drives. As for console i/o, I've seen a number of routines floating around in assembler, C and Pascal for directly accessing the Rainbow firmware routines. George P.S. Glad to see your interest in the Rainbow has perked up again, Gerry. Given you've already written the i/o routines when porting QNX, how difficult would it be to use these with Minix? /*--------------------------------------------*/ /* BITNET: GTHEALL@PENNDRLN */ /* INTERNET: GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.UPENN.EDU */ /* SnailMail: Department of Economics */ /* University of Pennsylvania */ /* 3718 Locust Walk /6297 */ /* Philadelphia, PA. 19104 */ /* AT+TNet: (215) 898-6741 */ /* ICBMNet: 39 57 N, 75 11 W, 200 Alt */ /*--------------------------------------------*/
wheels@mks.UUCP (Gerry Wheeler) (09/06/88)
I'm crossposting this to comp.os.minix for fairly obvious reasons. This discussion started earlier this week when I asked if anyone was aware of a DEC Rainbow version of Minix. In article <Added.4X8Lfny00Ui306bk8E@andrew.cmu.edu>, GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) writes: > I'm not aware of any ports of Minix to the Rainbow world, but > there was one made to the IBM PC family. Yes, I think that was the first machine it ran on. I have Tannenbaum's book describing Minix, and we have a copy at MKS, but I don't think it's ever been booted here. > Given you've already written the i/o routines when porting > QNX, how difficult would it be to use these with Minix? I don't know enough yet about Minix's innards to say, although Minix and QNX seem to have a LOT in common (both are message passing systems). The other problem is that I no longer work where I did the QNX port, so I dunno if I can still acess my old code. I dunno if they even have it! Would there be enough interest in a Rainbow version of Minix within the net community to kick it around a little? All those interested, send email. I'll summarise in a week or so. (Gee, I hope my mailbox can withstand the impending flood of messages. :-) If you have something to offer to such an effort (hardware or software expertise, Rainbow internal information, etc.) let me know. -- Gerry Wheeler Phone: (519)884-2251 Mortice Kern Systems Inc. UUCP: uunet!watmath!mks!wheels 35 King St. North BIX: join mks Waterloo, Ontario N2J 2W9 CompuServe: 73260,1043