From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] missing compilers? From: Geoff Collyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 20:58:15 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: d8235284-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > As long as we're talking about Plan 9 on Apple hardware, what about > the Motorola 68x based macs? It's reasonable to consider porting Plan 9 to machines that can run OS X only because the hardware is documented at least in the source code for Darwin (and other systems, such as OpenBSD), which is pretty likely to be correct and current, as documentation. I'm told that in the past Apple operated on the same principle as NeXt: that details of the hardware such as ROM contents could be changed on a whim since the company could then just tweak the OS to match. Thus the hardware was effectively undocumented, or at least underdocumented, from the point of view of someone writing code for the bare hardware. One could use the OpenBSD mac68k port as hardware documentation, but I think that porting to the 68k-based Macs would be, at minimum, painful and probably the resulting port would run on some machines of a particular model and not on others of the same model (that was true of the Plan 9 port to the NeXt). And aren't 68k-based Macs awfully old? As I recall, Apple started shipping Power PC Macs in 1994. Did 68k-based Macs even *have* Ethernet interfaces? > Also, I see you mentioned Inferno under OS X. For those of us who haven't > upgraded yet, would it be possible to port it to the classic Mac os's? I'll second Russ's comment: why not upgrade? If it's because your hardware is old enough that OS X won't run on it, I think you're just stuck. The internal differences between OS X and all earlier Mac OSes are enormous. OS X is essentially a recent BSD Unix system, with all that that implies: multiprogramming with pre-emptive scheduling, memory protection of the kernel from user processes and user processes from each other, POSIX threads, ANSI/POSIXy C library. It's my understanding that earlier Mac OSes had none of these. (Disclaimer: I avoided earlier Mac OSes, and did hear the rumour 10 years ago that System 7 did some minimal memory protection, but heard later that it wasn't effective.) Even Windows has some of these, to varying degrees. I'd expect porting drawterm to earlier Mac OSes to be painful, if it's even possible. OS X knows how to cope with 3-button mice; did earlier Mac OSes? If you're stuck with the 1-button Morse-code-key mouse, Inferno and drawterm would be awkward to use. Plan 9 would be too if older Mac hardware makes it impossible to replace the Morse-code-key mouse with a 3-button one.