Re: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

This has inspired me to re-read Melinda Varian's "What Mother Never Told You About VM Service" and it's still a magnificent document. I once again find the control files confusing as hell, but once you get used to how they work, which once upon a time I was, you had a repeatable (and unwindable!) service process. I miss the casualness with which you'd build a new CP nucleus and test it out on a second-level system. It's so much better than anything in the Unix world, far more elegant than testing kernel patches in a Linux virtual machine, largely because of the ease with which you can attach minidisks to a first, second, or whatever-level system. I guess cgroups and bind mounts finally get you most of the way there in terms of mounting arbitrary storage to virtual systems, but it's still a pain in the ass to test multiple kernels. Not that I spend much time anymore that far down in the system (any system!), but...VM got a lot of things right. Adam On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 7:15 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: