Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: MacMinix on PPC
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Sender: aje9383@cs.rit.edu
Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
From: aje9383@osfmail.isc.rit.edu (Andrew Erickson)
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Date: 29 Jan 1999 09:04:07 -0500
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In article <78kas9$keo$1@info.service.rug.nl>,
Wouter Hobers <xaviar@fmf01.fwn.rug.nl> wrote:
>Johnathon McAlister (maccer@uswest.net) wrote:
>: I recently downloaded MacMinix to try on my Performa 6200, which uses a 75
>: MHz PPC 603e chip and is running system 8.5.1.  The boot program launched
>: and printed messages that looked good, but then it locked up.  The FAQs I
>: saw were not very Mac specific, and I was wondering if anyone has gotten
>: MacMinix to run on a PPC based Mac.  If not, U might be interested in
>: hacking MacMinix to get it working, but I'm sure it would be slow going.
>
>1. MacMinix won't run on 32-bit Macs.

More specifically, it won't run with 32 bit addressing enabled.  (It may,
in fact, run if you start up a bunch of other program first--it just needs
to be in the lowest 8 MB or so of RAM.)

The reason for this is the way clicks are translated to and from addresses
internally by masking and shifting--click ennumerations are 16-bit, and each
click is 256 bytes.  The best solution is to make click id's 32 bit longs
rather than ordinary (short) ints.  It shouldn't be a very difficult task,
actually, but may require more than just tweaking the appropriate header.

(A click is the atomic amount of RAM minix will allocate.  Everything must
be in multiples of a click.)

Also, the processor cache needs to be turned off via the cache control
panel, and virtual memory (and Ram doubler) must be disabled.

>3. We're all waiting for somebody to take up the challenge to get
>   in sync with PC Minix 2.0.0 (or 2.0.2 now).

Hear!  Hear!

If I had some free time, I'd look into doing this; I don't have any free
time at the momment, nor do I expect to anytime soon, however.  Sigh.

--Andrew, aje9383@cs.rit.edu

>- Wouter
>:
>: xaviar@fmf.ml.org


