Re: We have a whole new ton of goodies to investigate...

u-vpoa
2015-04-27T07:06:43Z

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 12:31:28AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > I wonder, if Fuzix is sufficiently portable to run on 8086, could it
> > happen to offer a possibly even more suitable foundation for a usable
> > system, than the linux-derived code in ELKS?
>
> I'm not sure where the changeover point would be. ELKS supports
> asynchronous disk I/O properly, something FUZIX avoids. On an 8bit micro
> its pretty much pure overhead. On a PC/XT it's less clear.

My experience with again Venix/86: it came with an async XT hard disk
driver. Unfortunately this did not work with differing hd controllers,
not all computers were born equal enough.

Replacing the hd driver with a home made bios based one did not produce
any "noticeable" performance impact (i.e. never measured but never bothered).

There was not that much of parallelizable i/o and the CPU/RAM was often
the bottleneck. This can be different on faster reimplementations of *86
but the disks are now faster as well.

> ELKS is not that bloated to be honest. It's got a few areas that would
> probably save a chunk of memory if fixed but the basic architecture is
> pretty sound including basic 286 mode support.

Nice! I had an impression that it was severely constrained by the
64k limit for itself, which would make it very hard to extend the
functionality. Of course a part of the problem is the compiler
efficiency limitations.

> Some of the utilities are a bit brain-dead or buggy and might benefit
> from being pulled from elsewhere instead, and there are things lacking
> (like the real bourne shell should fit fine and is nowdays available)

Sure. Fortunately the user space is much easier to replace.

Rl