31 Oct
2003
31 Oct
'03
3:26 p.m.
Silly lawyers :-) I know I'm good, but building in all the HP-UX
features in a few months? Not that good (or modest for that matter).
Hm, 32V-x86 huh? Maybe, but I'd like to make it fairly portable and
have a number of targets built from the same source tree. I don't know
if that will ever happen, but I don't want to design it out either by
name or file partitioning. Maybe we can address the project name at a
later date.
I'll keep the VAX port alive throughout the project by making sure I can
cross compile a clean VAX kernel at every milestone. There may still be
a VAX in the building somewhere. Even if one was around, I won't be
testing the VAX port thanks to HP legal. We're now cleaning house of
alpha systems, so a VAX is almost impossible to locate. Darn mergers
keeps wiping them out, like that asteroid and dinosaurs years ago ;-)
Progress: I'm working on the make file. I'm trying to get a clean build
by substituting stubs for the VAX code I ripped out. Once done, I can
concentrate on x86 equivalents.
Device drivers: I have keyboard and character cell VGA code I can use.
I had been planning on adapting the Hale Landis ATA code from
http://www.ata-atapi.com/, and the Thix floppy driver from
http://www.hulubei.net/tudor/thix/ is probably a good piece of code to
model the 32V driver on.
Pat
Wesley Parish wrote:
It's downloaded.
I would suggest renaming it to something like 32V-x86, though - makes it
easier to remember it's not going to be precisely the same as 32V for VAX.
In relation to corporate caveats, the only way you could actually compete with
HP is if somehow, in a matter of months, you redid the entire development of
BSD and SVRx, up to the stage HP-UX currently is at.
Oh well, time for me to brush off my Pajari book on Unix device drivers and
see if I can make the grade! ;)
Wesley Parish