[Coco] Re: Possible OS-9 Project

[James Ross]

John E. Malmberg wrote:

>James Ross wrote:
>
>> - It would be written in 100% Intel Assembly Language.  
>
>That choice eliminates a number of platforms that would run as a host.

My view for this particular project is that multi-platform is not a
goal. Older Pentium PCs are readily available for next to nothing.  I
imagine some are even ending up at the city dump. The other day the
building custodian where I work brought in a Pentium 133mhz with 16
megs of RAM he picked up at a garage sale for $20.  This would be
plenty of horse power for this project (at least for the final version
1.0) 

>It currently is a rare assembly language programmer that can really do 
>better than the optimizer on a good C compiler.

I have seen this argument discussed to to nth degree on the ASM
newsgroups.  In my opinion, there is no compiler than can beat hand
assembly.  However, I can be wrong.  I was wrong once, the time I
discovered I was mistaken about being wrong!  :)

>> ...  Yet the file system, screen, and keyboard calls
>> would use the real physical devices and not emulated ones.  

>  The video card manufacturers are allegedly only providing the 
>information to run their cards at the fastest speeds to a certain 
>operating system vendor. 

Initially, I would steer away from using these video cards.  There are
still the VESA modes that can be used with many of these newer cards,
though.

>So it would be better to provide a library that could interface to both 
>X-11/Motif and Microsoft Windows than to try to get to the hardware.  I 
>am not sure what Macintosh needs now that their OS is UNIX based.

Ahh, but that is just what I would be trying to avoid.  Another
kludged, bloated, system.  If that is the case, then why not just use
Linux or Windows and be done with it? 

This does bring up the point that many of the video drivers available
for X are open source.  Which means down the road we could borrow the
code.

>Otherwise, the best way to get what you want is to start with a mininal 
>LINUX kernel, and add the OS-9 API to it.

Again, if I am going to do this, then might as well just stick with
Linux and helping their efforts instead of just forking another UNIX
clone. 

>If you are going to make something have memory protection, in order to 
>use it properly, you also need instruction restart.  Instruction restart 
>give you virtual memory.

I don't know about OS-9 / 9K but the CoCo's OS-9 does not have virtual
memory. Therefore I will not be implementing it.  Intel does have
memory protection without using paging. 

>It is up to you and who ever wants to join you. 

Ill be setting up a web site eventually for the project where I will
state the Goals of the project.  If someone agrees with those goals
and wants to participate that will great. If not I'll go it alone.

> I do operating system 
>work for a living, and have no interest in creating one on my own time.

I don't blame you there! I program Web Applications at work.
Therefore I would not be interested in doing that as a free pet
project at home either.  But getting down to the nitty gritty assembly
level sounds like fun to me.

Just because someone does not participate in the project it does not
mean that they can't offer approval / disapproval, suggestions, or
just plain old criticisms!! :)

JR