Checklist To Add 64 Bit Support

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

So I know it's bad etiquette to talk about your hardware, other people
might not be able to afford the same.

We have health issues in our family and we do not have very much money.
I am not bragging !

With this aside, I just bought a used machine on the weekend. It is an
I7 with 16GB of RAM. It was $180 CAD, about $140 USD.

Who the hell needs 16GB to do something natively, at least at home or in
a home based office. It's stupid amounts of power.

Almost everyone is running Minix under virtualisation but then we miss
out on a lot of neat stuff such writing userland drivers and controlling
home brewed hardware.

If Minix has 64 bit support and could use large amounts of memory, could
we not invert this situation and run Linux/Windows under virtualisation
such as qemu running on Minix.

I just compiled qemu from source on Linux. I think it would need GCC
under Minux. It also might not be able to run under Minix at all, as my
first attempt to compile it was with tcc failed with complaints about
thread issues.

Anyhow, I think it's worth a try. If this works out, people could run
what is missing from Minix, such as a modern GUI based web browser under
qemu(or similar).

Before I set out(and this might take me a long time as I work so slowly)
what topics will I have to address?

I know the start up code is in assembly, so I probably should become
familiar with the ARM and i386 files. What else would I need to contend
with?

Thanks for any feedback-Pat

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

Hi,

I believe this thread mostly addresses your questions, or at least touches on them : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Minix3/ONNF27C69lo. Despite its age it's still fairly relevant, even if i386 BIOS-capable systems are clearly on their way out now.

[Bengo]

Hi Jean,

Paraphrasing your words:   "The cross-toolchain, arch-specific code (kernel, VM, libraries...), virtual memory, syscalls and 64 bit cleanliness issues (mostly in minix/ipc.h)"

I have some questions that maybe you could help resolve or point to the right direction.

That will be it to have a very minimal 64bits system?  (I know without userland)

Has anybody started the cross-toolchain generation (sorry I did a quick search on the group but not find  anything related)

On your own perspective what would be better 64bits port o Minix or a SMP kernel and multithread implementation (kernel and user based) for 32bits?

thanks