[TUHS] Re: Porting Unix v6 to i386

[Greg Lehey]

On Thursday, 31 January 2002 at 20:45:03 +0200, Lauri Aarnio wrote:
> In message <02013117091301.00697 at linux>, Sven Dehmlow writes:
>> On Thursday 31 January 2002 12:00, P.A.Osborne wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 11:18:06AM +0200, Lauri Aarnio wrote:
>>>> Have you considered using Tanenbaum's Minix as a reference ?
>>>
>>> Funnily enough - no.  Which was a tad daft as I have a copy
>>> of the original Tanenbaum book on a shelf about 2 feet above
>>> the monitor....  :-)   sheepish grin
>>>
>>
>> Good than it will be easy for you to take a look into this book and
>> to find out that Minix is a microkernel. You want to code a
>> monolithic kernel.
>
> It doesn't matter at all if it is a microkernel or not, if somebody
> just needs a reference implementation; How device drivers work or how
> the '286 memory management needs to be set up is practically the same;
> what matters is that Minix runs in 16-bit protected mode whereas
> Linux and *BSD don't.

To repeat what I said earlier: the hardware-dependent code isn't very
interesting, it's the kernel interfaces.  Minix is not UNIX; BSD is.
You'll find it easier to adapt a BSD driver to the Sixth or Seventh
Edition than you will a Minix or Linux driver.

Greg
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