[Coco] This tickles me....

[Chuck Youse]

On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 00:27 -0500, Sean wrote:
> I know I'm part of the base you don't like... I want to play the games
> on the emulators, otherwise I don't have a lot of reason for playing
> around on the CoCo anymore...
> 
> Now, had some Linus Torvalds equivalent made an open-source OS9 for
> the PC about 15 years ago... Well, that could have been pretty sweet.
> I really miss the modules and OS layout, it would have been really
> good on the PC.  Multiple terminals and windows back in 1990... Put
> MS-DOS to shame!
> 

This is actually on my list now that I'm ditching the Coco proper.  I
have several (professional) products that call for an RTOS to run on x64
machines, and the choices in this arena (aside from stupidly expensive
commercial ones) are pretty limited.  The industry standard these days
is Linux - just about all "appliance" items are running some hacked up
version of Linux (most of them in violation of the GPL, but that's a
different matter).  I've had my fair share of building embedded Linux
systems, and it's an amazing exercise in wasted resources, both in
development and at runtime.  Something slimmer and OS-9 like would suit
me just fine.  The x64 stuff provides position independence without
segmentation, and along with a ginormous address space (44+ bits in
current implementations), a similar architecture is now possible.  Page
tables can be used to prevent unintentional access to other modules for
safety, but everyone can still share a unified address space.  (For
performance, the page protection can be turned off to avoid TLB flushes
and misses.)

Device descriptors will probably be changed to reflect PCI vendor/card
and instance information rather than device addresses.  That's minor.
The semantics of device drivers, etc. will have to change - OS-9
serializes access to the device drivers to provide sychronization, but
on today's architectures that's a huge performance limitation.  And
obviously, SMP support is a must, which also affects synchronization.
Blah, blah, blah.

But for the most part, the system can remain very similar.  

I'll drop a line to the list when I've got something tangible.  I wonder
if I would be exposed legally in some way, pissing off Radisys.

C.