[XCSSA] updating a kernel without rebooting

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:
> 
> On Aug 17, 2006, at 1:29 PM, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:
> 
>> I remember the days of OS/9 - not the Apple O/S but the C/PM-based O/S -
>> when you needed to have the entire boot sequence on a 180 MB S/S floppy
>> disk.  In those days, you would build your "boot" with a utility called
>> "cobbler."  (Cobblers make new boots, right?)  If I remember correctly
>> there was only the tiniest bit of code comprising the nugget of the
>> kernel and the rest was the specific commands you reckoned you'd need.
> 
> OS/9 was a Unix-like OS.  It was definitely not based on anything in CP/M.
> 

Thank you...I thought I had stepped into an alternate reality.  I ran 
OS-9 on my CoCo III for 3 years.  Once I got that, I never saw the BASIC 
prompt again, except to boot into OS-9.

> In any case, OS/9 was very modular, in very much the way that Linux 
> isn't.  Just about everything was a module, written in 
> position-independent code (which was an important feature of the 6809 
> CPU).  There was a kernel, but that was only one module in the boot 
> image.  All the drivers were separate modules unto themselves 
> concatenated to the kernel to make the boot image, and the kernel 
> scanned for and loaded them at boot time.  The equivalent in Linux is if 
> you want to update a module, you can rmmod and then insmod the new 
> module.  Even the executables were modules.

Yes, adding new device drivers was quite the chore, as I remember.
On the CoCo III, you could have up to 512K (!!) of RAM, but the 6809 
could still only access 64K and of that, only 40K or so was available 
for a program, the rest being device drivers, and all of the routines 
for monitoring keyboard, video, etc.  The MMU switched 64K chunks around 
to do its multitasking.

Ah, those were the days.  Chugging along at a glorious 1.8 MHz...


-- 
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire,
a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should
it be left to irresponsible action." -- George Washington
--
Mitch Thompson, San Antonio, Texas//WB5UZG
Red Hat Certified Engineer