adm@cbneb.UUCP (07/17/84)
#N:cbneb:15100001:000:379 cbneb!jdd Jul 17 16:01:00 1984 I have recently heard about OS-9 which is a UNIX-like (but evidently not UNIX-derived) system which was originally developed for 6809 based systems and now being ported to 68000s. Has anyone worked with it? What are its pros and cons. I've heard that for real-time work it is excellent. John Daleske ..cbosgd!cbscc!cbneb!jdd Advanced Programming Resources, Inc (614) 888-3968
KSPROUL@RUTGERS.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (07/20/84)
My brother has used OS-9 for the 6809 ever since it came out and loves it, the people that developed the system did a good job, and I have known that they were working on the 68000 version for awhile, at one time there was a rumor that they had stopped work, but I am glad that wasnt true.. I expect that OS-9 for the 68K will be quite good, and not too expencive.. Keith Sproul Ksproul@Rutgers.arpa -------
emjej@uokvax.UUCP (07/20/84)
#R:cbneb:15100001:uokvax:3400045:000:2568 uokvax!emjej Jul 20 11:39:00 1984 /***** uokvax:net.micro / cbneb!jdd / 11:14 pm Jul 17, 1984 */ I have recently heard about OS-9 which is a UNIX-like (but evidently not UNIX-derived) system which was originally developed for 6809 based systems and now being ported to 68000s. Has anyone worked with it? What are its pros and cons. I've heard that for real-time work it is excellent. /* ---------- */ Oy, did you push my button... :-> I am using OS-9 (Level II, on a Smoke Signal Broadcasting machine with hard disk) to write applications for a fellow, and in the process port as much public-domain C software to OS-9 as I can (as well as rolling my own). I should shortly get OS-9 for my CoCo. Pros: it is designed for personal computers, to wit: it doesn't swap, and otherwise gets along without the considerable resources needed to make Unix run reasonably. It will run on machines without memory management, and the structures they used to do this permit some neat stuff in its own right (dynamic linking and shared libraries, for example). People I know who have hacked Unix internals and who look at the structure of OS-9 tend to say, "gee, that's a lot cleaner." (Example--underneath the kernel is a module called IOMAN, which does all the stuff common to all I/O. It in turn refers to one of SCFMAN (sequential character file manager), RBFMAN (random block file manager), ... to do things that are common to those classes of devices. At the bottom level live device drivers. (Curiosity: one of the variant tag values on path descriptors in the OS-9/68000 docs is listed as NET.)) Cons: it doesn't have all that software. (yet.) (every so often, I refer to Unix as the OS/360 of the 80's...) It lacks a way to install privileged programs (setuid or its moral equivalent), and has various security holes (e.g. the stock password file keeps passwords in clear--a friend and I are putting in stuff to fix that). It really needs a reasonable language, as opposed to C, to do the things (packages/modules/abstract data types) that OS-9 will support very nicely, thank you. There's a curious non-orthogonality in I/O for SCF (sequential character file) devices, where raw/cooked I/O is oddly tied to reading/writing only up to a newline. If you have a CoCo, the limitations of the I/O hardware make OS-9 slower than it should be. I can't say how well it does in real-time applications. Come August 17-20, a lot of people will converge on Des Moines to talk about OS-9. I hope to be among them, and I hope to get a chance to talk about how to get around some of the cons. James Jones