UNIX on 68000s?

utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!eagle!mitccc!zrm utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!eagle!mitccc!zrm
Sun Jan 24 03:07:47 AEST 1982


As microprocessors like the 68000 plummet in price, being able to get
a hold of a high quality UNIX for one of these beasties becomes
something of a preoccupation. The trouble is that there don't seem to be
any decent 68000 boards extant. Things like write protected pages for
shared text, and memory protection in general are pretty much neccesary
to run UNIX reasonably. The scads of ads claiming UNIX runs on this or that
firm's 68000 based system seem a bit dubious. The only rumor that seems promising
is the one about Lucasfilms having sold all its PERQs and replaced them with
68000 based systems running V7 with all sorts of Berkeley goodies thrown
in. But with the current lack of an MMU for the 68000, there just has to
be loads of cruft in existing systems (or perhaps I'll be pleasantly
surprised). It seems that what will separate the good from the bad --
for now -- is how cleanly the memory management meshes with the UNIX
implementation. Making UNIX deal with real live memory management ain't
easy. I would be surprised if anybody managed to do a good job of it.

I guess what I would really like to see is:

1)Hardware that can hack page faults, page address translation, and
  memory protection.

2)Software that takes advantage of this, as VMUNIX takes full advantage
  of a VAX. Somehow I doubt anyone has got their act this much together.

3)The nitty little details, like some device drivers for Multibus
  devices, a debugger and whatever other machine dependent utilities there
  need be.

If anybody out there has experience with UNIX on 68000s PLEASE share
your experiences with me. Thanks in advance and

Cheers,
Zig



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