[TUHS] I threw together a MINIX 1.5 system call emulator

[Chris Hanson]

Since MINIX was a UNIX V7 clone for teaching, I figure this is at least somewhat on-topic.

I’ve wanted to port MINIX 1.5 for M68000 to other systems besides Amiga, Atari ST, and the classic Mac, but trying to do that within a system emulator is a pain and doesn’t help you use a modern editor or SCM system. So I took the Musashi M68000 emulator and, using the MINIX 1.5 sources for Atari ST for reference, I’ve implemented a system call emulator that’s now _almost_ sufficient to run /usr/bin/cc.

It’s up on GitHub at https://github.com/eschaton/MINIXCompat and I’ve released it under an MIT license. It requires my forked version of the Musashi project that supports implementing a TRAP instruction via a callback, which is necessary for implementing system calls on the host side. I reference this via a submodule so it can be kept at least logically distinct from the rest of the code. There’s no Makefile as I’m using Xcode on macOS to develop it, though I expect to write one at some point so I can run it on NetBSD and Linux as well as on macOS; writing one should be straightforward.

  -- Chris