🚀 go-pugleaf

Boy, I really hate to say this.  I am an amiga.fan more than anyone
else I know but recently I read "Inside OS/2".  It gives a real good
view of the philosopy of OS/2 and it is a programmers-only book.
The way they designed the memory allocation system is (arrgh!  am I
actually posting this?) really quite nice.

The only change that would be needed to amiga-ize OS/2's MMU structure
would be to replace the word "segment" with the phrase "hunk of
memory allocated with AllocMem".  Then, MEMF_CHIP would be memory that
can't be swapped out and would have the same physical address as it's
vurtual address.

The OS could detect an older machine (without an MMU) and
automatically do the same memory allocation functions just without 
memory protection.

The conversion from old-programs to new-programs wouldn't be too bad.
Old programs could be 100% unprotected and possibly they could be
given privs to read any memory location.  This is a big hole in the
system but providing upward compatability... well, hopefully someone
would come up with a better method to do that. :-)

If it were optional to allow old programs to modify other's memory
programmers would have a easier time of converting old code.
-- 
       Tom Limoncelli -- Drew University, Box 1060, Madison, NJ 07940
  TLimonce@Drew.Bitnet -- limonce@pilot.njin.net -- VoiceMail (201)408-5389
 Drew College of Liberal Arts: male/female ratio: 2:3  student/pc ratio: 1:1
	   "The opinions expressed are mine... just mine."