VSTa on the Amiga

VSTa For Amiga Lives!

I guess now is a good time to announce that I have VSTa running on my
Amiga. I just got the keyboard driver working today and the screen driver
earlier this week. I booted up and ran VSTa with three processes:
the screen driver, the keyboard driver and a test process which does
I/O through the two servers and everything seems to be working ok.

What is VSTa? The name stands for Valencia's Simple Tasker. It is
a small microkernel based operating system. It borrows ideas from
QNX and Plan9. Under VSTa all device drivers and filesystems are
user-level processes that interact with each other through message
passing. VSTa presents the system to the user as a number of filesystems
as Plan9 does. For more information:

    ftp.cisco.com:/vandys/vsta - ftp archive
    ftp.cygnus.com:/pub/embedded/vsta - ftp archive
    vsta@cisco.com - mailing list
    vsta-request@cisco.com - mailing list requests

The amiga port somewhat of a kludge right now. It needs lots of cleaning up,
some disk drivers and lots of love and care. It currently is written
to run only on 68030's and possibly 020's with MMU's. There is no
support for the '040 MMU. There are no disk drivers yet.
Some of the features are in a "hack" state so that I could get
things running and the boot loader has my system setup hardwired in.

I invite any experienced amiga programmers to help out. I will continue
to work on the port and hope to eventually have VSTa self hosting,
running as my primary Operating System on my amiga.

                                     Tim Newsham
                               newsham@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
Received on Sat Sep 17 15:17:44 1994