Category Archives: minix

Virtualization Challenge III – Acorn ARM Minix

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(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Recently came across this unfinished port of Minix 1.5 to Acorn Archimedes A310. According to the readme file this is a set of patches that needs to be applied on a standard Minix 1.5.10 code base on a Unix machine. The code then needs to be to transferred to Risc OS machine for compilation. Once complete then you need to manually create boot records and a file system. Sounds like a fun little project.

What I want is pretty standard:

  • A ready to use working disk image that anyone can unpack and run on a modern machine under an emulator of your choice (commercial OK).
  • Aclock binary and screenshot.

First person to deliver these gets a prize of £100 (that is 100 GBP / Pound Sterling). I strongly encourage to coordinate your efforts via comments.

If needed I can supply licenses for commercial Acorn emulators and C compiler for Risc OS, albeit I only have license for a modern ROOL DDE. I hope ancient version is not needed, but this part of the challenge. Note that I can’t just give away the licenses to anyone, I will only share or purchase new licenses for serious contenders on one to one basis.

Let the challenge begin!

Anyone in need of bash?

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I found this post the other day, and thought it was interesting.

Date: 13 Apr 91 18:17:44 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 18

I've recently ported bash to minix-386 (nice, but takes about 300kB of
RAM). It's been "tested" by me using it all the time (good editing and
history - couldn't live without it any more), but I won't make any
guarantees. If anybody is interested in cdiffs against bash-1.05, please
mail me (I'll post if there is enough interest).

The port definitely needs GCC, and 386-minix. ST-minix will probably
work as well (I've sent it to one ST-minixer), after changeing a #define
LITTLE_ENDIAN to BIG_ENDIAN. If the port already has been done by
someone else - just ignore this message.

		Linus Torvalds		[email protected]

PS. I've hacked the kernel to accept gcc-compiled programs directly
without going through gcc2minix, but I haven't tested it very much yet
(bash works though, so most things probably will). Changes are trivial,
mail me if interested. (And yes - it accepts old minix format too - you
don't have to recompile everything :-)

Naturally it’s about the impending birth of Linux.  First he needed to get GCC running under Minix 386, but I didn’t know at the time that he had patches floating around to allow Minix to directly run the GCC A.OUT format executables.

Scary to think that if Minix had allowed submissions and ‘bloat’ that Linux would have never been.

On the other hand, much like 386BSD the backpressure of having some kind of free BSD/UNIX system which did take in submissions was overwhelming, with the false start of 386BSD going the route of Minix and in that first critical year not pulling in any of the additional patches, while Linux grew by leaps and bounds.  By the time the AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit hit, well the game was already in Linux’s favour, even with it’s already fragmented distro base.

MacMinix

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MacMinix

Once upon a time, I bought a Mac Plus, and decked it out with 4MB of ram, and a 40MB SCSI hard disk. I thought it was so cool, I even got a cable to talk to a normal external modem, and used it as a compact terminal to BBS, although the 800Kb floppies were a bit of a pain….

Anyways it was OK for a while but system 6 is so… limiting. Then I started using it for a foot rest, as I couldn’t do anything really more with it. Then someone at college pointed out that Minix actually supported a bunch of 68000 based machines, namely the Amiga, Atari ST, and the Macintosh!!!

The best part of the Mac port being that you didn’t have to format, repartition or anything, as it was essentially and operating environment!

The best parts being, that it had vi, and even a C compiler! Although without documentation getting things in & out of the Mac seemed impossible, and I kind of gave up on it.

But after digging around these ancient Linux things, I thought I’d take a look at MacMinix again.

To start, Brad Pliner has an excellent site, with lots of documentation for this port of Minix, including some PDF’s of the instructions.

I’ve detailed some of the install steps on gunkies.

The only real downside will be that the C compiler is ancient… It really can’t compare to MINT’s GCC.

DOS-Minix 2.04

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I was looking around for some old compilers as a side project of mine has stalled looking for some TS-11 Fortran compiler with overlays.

Anyways I found mention of this DOS-Minix.  It does NOT comply with things like DPMI, VCPI as it will not run in nice things like emm386 & other v86 switchers.  However it will run in DOSBox.

Digging through the kernel & the boot program, you’ll find the basics of a DOS Extender.  The boot program will allocate as much memory as it can from the XMS driver, and then switch to protected mode & transfer control to the kernel.  Likewise the kernel then uses MS-DOS & BIOS calls for video, disk access etc as you can find it’s int86 calls that switch from protect to real mode, (doshead.s) or even in the disk driver dosfile.c

Installation is SUPER simply, just download the file DOSMINIX.ZIP unzip it somewhere then either use the great DOSBox, or any other pc emulation etc that you could want to use. The NTVDM from Windows NT is not good enough as you’ll get an error message about not being able to load the 386 kernel on an 8086.  This again probably stems from dosminix not using DPMI calls, but the old fashioned raw XMS calls.. I guess it *could* be updated.

Start it up is simple you just run the boot program and point it to a diskfile:

boot minix.mnx

Then you’ll get greeted by the boot loader..  For me hitting any key doesn’t do anything, so I just press escape, then type in boot.

And in NO time, you’ll be up and running MINIX!

The ‘best’ way to shut it down I’ve found is to type in ‘reboot’ then press escape like wild, and you’ll interrupt the boot loader.  Then you can type in ‘exit’ and you’ll get dumped back into MS-DOS.

I think it’s an interesting example of how to use the ancient MS-DOS to bootstrap yourself into protected mode. And the source seems somewhat straight forward.

dosminix on DOSBox.

dosminix on DOSBox.