Comments on: Virtualization Challenge IV – Act II – QNX 1.2 HDD Boot ($2000 prize)

By: YateBTS

YateBTS — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 11:42:24 +0000

Nice challenge and pretty good answer provided by Hawk.ro

By: Roy

Roy — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 16:36:07 +0000

In reply to Mihai Gaitos. bookmarked for reading later. thanks for writing!

By: Mihai Gaitos

Mihai Gaitos — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 08:47:28 +0000

For those who are curious: the entire story is here:
https://hawk.ro/stories/qnx12/
In order to keep its length reasonable I skipped over some details but feel free to ask.

By: Mihai Gaitos

Mihai Gaitos — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:20:18 +0000

In reply to Chris Kolenda. Thank you for your appreciation. I like the SDF idea, I just registered!

By: Chris Kolenda

Chris Kolenda — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 15:02:08 +0000

In reply to Mihai Gaitos.

Congratulations and thanks for the fine work!!
https://hawk.ro/qnx12_pcjs/ is great.

Best regards in 2021

By: Mihai Gaitos

Mihai Gaitos — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 09:14:20 +0000

In reply to Dan Dodge.

Thank you!
I will write you the details from the hawk.ro address (as a simple form of identification).

Once again, thank you for the challenge (and the prize, of course)!

By: Mitchell Schoenbrun

Mitchell Schoenbrun — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 05:47:19 +0000

Say Dan, I’d like to send you an email. I’m at maschoen@pobox.com.

By: Dan Dodge

Dan Dodge — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 04:50:12 +0000

The contest has been won. I just did a
$ cd /user/quantum
$ cc hanoi.c
and ran it. It brought back very fond memories. So, how do I send the funds?

By: Mihai Gaitos

Mihai Gaitos — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 01:16:13 +0000

I removed the ugly xi/sh hack, now system starts with proper search 3 default.
search is modified at a later point (I assume when reconfiguring for dual FDD), so that it ends up being search 3 2 but config/sys.init takes care of that. Just in case, I also added a cd 3:/ command, but it doesn’t seem necessary.

I’d rather only have search 3 because, in case of a mistyped command it will take a while to search everywhere, especially if no diskette is inserted.

As usual, image is at https://hawk.ro/files/qnx12_hddboot_v008.img.gz and the js has been updated as well.

By: Mihai Gaitos

Mihai Gaitos — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 10:53:45 +0000

It might well be that the differences were only in library files. Another thing I’ve noticed in this adventure was that there are a few stub functions that – at least in 1.2 – don’t do anything except return 0 or the value passed to them as argument. I assume that those functions were placeholders for functionality that was not yet implemented.
And while writing that it occured to me that I have both 1.2 and 2.21 on my computer and could perform a simple check. Most libraries (that is object files in lib) are different, except for:
bound_chk.o
fgetline.o
ker4.o
lsupport.o
memfns.o
share.o

And I’ve just noticed that, even in 1.2, asm already knows about 186/286 processors. (I assume +186 and +286 are related to that)

As to the reason they were missing, it might be that when using keyboard to switch from pcem to another window/desktop, the keypress would be passed to pcem as well. And backup (as well as other QNX programs) can be “paused” with a keypress (and resumed with ENTER). So I might have paused it without noticing and then seeing the output stopped I assumed it copied everything.