> Geoff Winkless wrote... > > > > With the impending possibility of a decent-speed sam, the imminence of > > various Hard Drives and the arrival of the (bare bones, admittedly) C > > compiler, who would be interested in porting Linux (or BSD) to the > > new machine? > > EeeeeeeeeeK! Linux?!? It's bad enough trying to compile it on this > machine (486DX2/66 with 8MB memory, 10MB source code), although you > could probably junk some of the drivers. But you're still looking at > 6-10MB of C source code. Heaven only knows what a Z80 version would > be like!
SOME of the drivers??? My guess is that you can junk around 70% of everything that's in there. What is the point of having support for Appleshare, 387 emulation, support for X number of filesystems, umsdos- support, cd-rom (perhaps in the future? :), etc. > > > Sam as it stands just isn't capable of this kind of system, but with > > 4M RAM, a hd and c compiler we could knock something up that might > > be worth running. > > I've got ArmLinux on my 4MB A5000 (Archimedes). That doesn't run at > all... :( Minix ran on an 8086 with 640K. > > > My personal feeling is that we should try and aim for a basic Unix > > system written purely in z80. > > This is a good idea. I like Unix. Me too. > > > People say `use C' but unfortunately > > that way lies code bloat. Original systems fitted in to 64k. I would > > suggest that it would be possible (if the z380 has a decent MMU) to > > write a functional unix (by todays standards) that could > > run on a single meg without too much disk hammering, but most of the > > core would -have- to be written in z(3)80 code. > > Well, Linux on this machine takes up around 3.5MB just booting up. > It might be tricky to get it into 1MB... It is not impossible. In fact, if the C-compiler is good (let's face it, most of the non-time critical code is already there so why not use it? - the main problem is to get the code re-entrant and perhas dynamically linked? :), a usable Linux-port could be done in 250-300K of kernel. However, the question is if it is possible to use the MMU of the z380? SI? > > > As will be patently obvious I haven't really thought this through but > > this would -not- be a short or particularly easy job, something of a > > labour of love. More a question of `yes it is possible' rather than > > `hey let's make everyone buy a sam'.. > > I'll be in it if people are going to give it a go... I might. If we do a propper design, we might be able to split the thing up into parts that can be coded indvidually. > > > Ideas, criticisms, personality assassinations to this group please! > > What about X as well? Now that *would* be impressive on a SAM... :) Running X on a machine with only 4Mb is darn slow. I'd rather have multiple virtual terminals, but it won't be impossible either I guess. > > RJP > > ps RE: My stack problem was in conjunction with FORTH for the SAM. > Still doesn't work though. :( Forth for SAM - isn't that a step backwrds? :) -Frode
