Not again (was Re: Port of MINIX to Unix-PC)

John R. MacMillan john at chance.UUCP
Sat Mar 23 00:06:12 AEST 1991


|Damn, I see a lot of $$ pledges, and lots of moral support, but nobody
|has the time, experience, or *whole hearted desire* to put BSD (or
|minix or SVR3 or ...) on this machine.

That's why we chose Minix, it's small and simple, and a port already
exists for similar processors.  I certainly don't have the time (or
inclination) to port BSD to the 3B1, but I really do think we can pull
Minix off.

We're ahead of the talk that's gone around before: we've started.
We've got the Minix source (so we've laid out some (minor) dollars),
it's on the 3B1, we've written a console driver, and done a fair bit
of playing on the bare 68010 (no os running).  We have access to the
hardware ref, kernel experience, a spare PC7300, and the desire.

It's possible that for unforseen reasons we won't finish.  It's almost
certain that it will take longer than we'd like.  But I would (and
have) bet the price of Minix on doing it ($187 Cdn).

We would like to get a minimal port (16 bit ints, no memory
protection) up and then post or make available the diffs so that
anyone who wants to can play, and help make the port more full-
featured.  Until that time, I don't think we need any help.



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