Re: Direction of VSTa

[Gerd Truschinski <gt@freebsd.first.gmd.de> writes:]

>what is the further way of VSTa?

The one True Way. :-)

>Will there be more man pages?

Yes (he said hopefully).

>Will there be Runes?

Um, er, maybe. There's been a lot of discussion on this front. I,
personally, am focusing a couple levels down, on base OS technology.
Others have various levels of motivation on this front.

>Will there be a system in the file system? I.e. source and binary
>in different directories?

Done. 1.4 will have this (next week).

>Will there be support for other CPUs than the Intel family?

Done. 68030 Amiga will be in the next source tree.

>Will there be the sources for the man system?

The man command is in src/bin/cmds/man.c. The source for the man pages
themselves is in doc/man/*. The source is in roff format; a nroff subset
which processes very quickly.

>Ok, I have a MIPS system I want to port VSTa to. Someone has started
>it, that seems to be not the problem. But there is NO documentation
>that could help me. Am I right?

The source is copiously commented. The break-out for the 68030 port should
help your effort quite a bit. There is no "port manual", as such.

>For now I have a FreeBSD system I edit my sources on. This is because
>I need a machine I could see both, the VSTa and the FreeBSD sources on.
>Then I boot VSTa on that machine (486 with an Adaptec SCSI board).
>Compile my sources to a new server; CAM is his name. And after that I
>boot DOS to copy the server to a boot disk for my 386SX VSTA machine.
>Then I do some testing.
>You see, a lot of OS is needed to do my work.

Well, if you really want to go this path, you might hack up a driver for
FreeBSD which would function like VSTa's boot.exe for DOS.

>So, what I need is a VSTa machine with a graphic front end and enough
>driver to support MY hardware. I.e I also have a wd8003 board. Not
>a NE2000 clone.

I scrape by with the multi-screens.

>But I don't even know how to fork a process. There is no description....

Be prepared for a surprise: fork() (:->)

In general, you should try the POSIX interface; this is what we followed by
default. The man system doesn't document all this because I figured that
most folks know the interface already, so I just wrote up man pages for the
underlying messaging engine, which is unique to VSTa.

>What I like? This 60xxx message while the system is booting. This seems
>to tell me something about the memory requirements during the boot
>process. FreeBSD systems seems to be some magnitudes bigger.

Thanks; the joys of microkernels.

>But what about Plan9. Am I right that they have a Berkeley style
>copyright? And that they have more documentation?

I haven't seen the Plan9 restrictions. I'd be surprised if AT&T was as
generous as the Berkeley distribution, but you never know.

                                                Regards,
                                                Andy Valencia
Received on Sun Aug 6 06:11:15 1995