Re: *nix on lisa ?

On 07/22/2010 02:55 AM, barana wrote:
> The LISA contains a MMU. In theory we could have a modern slim distro
> like netbsd or something just as similar running on it...
>
> Has anyone ever tried this before ?
>
>

Well, there is Xenix and UniPlus. Modern Linux and *BSD are way too huge to run there. You might be able to do it with a very early version of those, but you're probably better off attempting with something like MINIX. The Linux 1.x kernels or one of the early BSD kernels might work, but most of these require at least a 68030. Very early Linux kernels won't work as it was targeted to i386 only. Not sure which version was ported to run on 68K's. There is also Mach and Xinu that might be worth looking at, but probably, your best bet would be an early incarnation Minix. I'd start here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/itimpi/minix68k.htm and http://www.minix3.org

Mind you, at most you have 2MB of RAM, and at minimum 512KB. So you'd need to start from source code that would run on that class of machine, then rewrite the MMU code as well as all the I/O drivers, and it has to all fit within 5MB-10MB of disk fully installed.

It can be done, but it'll be a lot of hard work. We're talking at least several months. For example: the 68000 opcodes are not fully restartable, so you'll have to tweak whatever compiler you write to emit restartable code, or at least code that uses restartable opcodes to try access to a memory page (so a segfault could invoke the MMU code) before the actual memory access code runs.

Modern "slim" distros usually require at least 128MB of memory, and about a CD's worth of local storage - maybe at minimum 50MB, so that's not going to fit.

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