<REFERENCE>PRIME>DRB>PRIMEUNIX

The "mythical" port of unix to 50-Series

Message-ID: <bnews.populi.194>
Newsgroups: net.usenix
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!G:usenix
From: G:usenix
Date: Sat Jun  5 04:57:46 1982
Subject: Technical Program for Boston Meeting
X-Google-Info: Converted from the original B-News header
Posted: Fri Jun  4 18:54:37 1982
Received: Sat Jun  5 04:57:46 1982
...
Friday, July 9, 1982
...
11:20 AM -11:40 AM      James L. Weiner and Brian L. Johnson
Computer Science Department
University of New Hampshire
UNIX/Prime
Porting the UNIX operating system to Prime machines

appears in -
Pages: 247-248
Proceedings: USENIX Conference Proceedings
Date: Summer 1982

Abstracts

11:20 AM UNIX/Prime: Porting the UNIX operating system to Prime machines

 James L. Weiner and Brian L. Johnson
 Computer Science Department
 University of New Hampshire
 Durham, N.H. 03824

 A project is under way at the Computer Science Department of the
 University of New Hampshire to port the UNIX operating system to run
 on Prime equipment. UNIX will run on top of a kernel of the Prime
 operating system (PRIMOS~), rather than either on a bare bones machine
 or on top of the full operating system. UNIX will have the same
 access to kernel operations that PRIMOS has and thus its
 implementation will not suffer from having to be simulated. Our goal
 is to develop a standard UNIX without restrictions. Of course, due to
 the differing hardware there will be slight exceptions.

 The Prime hardware makes our project interesting outside of just
 having UNIX available on a different machine. Memory on the Prime is
 partitioned into 65K segments which can be in any one of three rings
 of protection. Every user runs a virtual machine with security
 provided by the rings rather than changing context and running kernel
 mode. Prime also has hardware that supports many of the same features
 as does the UNIX notion of signals. They are actually more flexible
 since users may define their own. Along with the hardware support for
 signals is hardware support for semaphores which are used in our
 implementation as well as available to users.

 As part of our project we are developing a general mechanism for
 treating segments of memory as an abstract data type that supports
 operations such as allocate, deallocate and share. This will allow an
 additional form of interprocess communication with no additional
 overhead as well as a start to incorporating datagrams into a UNIX
 network.

 ~PRIMOS is a trademark of Prime Computer

Title   Joint conference proceedings, Boston, July 1982
Publication
Description     Spine title: USENIX proceedings, 1982
Subject(s)      UNIX (Computer file), Operating systems (Computers)
Physical Description    Book
vii 357 xvi p - 29 cm

        Click here to request via UBorrow.              Request
        Source  Location        Call Number     UBorrow Availability
        UILLINOIS       Engineering     005.43 US7J     Requestable