5 Jan
2017
5 Jan
'17
7:52 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 01:58:39PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
I worked on the ETA-10 (CDC spinoff, Neil Lincoln was
the architect):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA10
No idea if the code is still around, I would guess it's lost. Be fun
if it showed up, I wrote a kmem "driver" so I could get my own version
of ps(1) to run. As I recall, it was an ioctl that just fed me back
everything I needed, it wasn't a kmem driver at all, this was my first
real job after grad school and I had no idea how to write a driver :)
I am apparently wrong, this has made be go through my notes. I actually
wrote some drivers for the ETA project (I'm sure by copying other ones
and hacking them).
The ETA had local memory and then a big pool of shared memory but it
was bcopy() shared. I wrote the driver that let you access the shared
memory.
The proc/kmem thing was driven by the fact that nlist was slow. So I
wrote a driver that gave you the process table. Pretty simple.
There was something called an Ibis disk, I didn't do the controller
part, I did the Unix part that talked to the controller. My notes say
"I wrote the Unix side of the driver which involved mapping the IOU into
shared memory. Both interrupt and polled versions were used, currently
the polled is used due to interrupt problems with I/O channels."
All that said, I'm not a driver person, I suck at that.