🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec16.043917.1193@cc.umontreal.ca> kosmatoo@JSP.UMontreal.CA (Kosmatos Odisseas) writes:
>I was wondering whether there are any plans on supporting virtual memory
>with MultiTos.

The initial release of MultiTOS will not have virtual memory build into
the kernel. It's possible that 3rd party virtual memory products
available for TOS will work with MultiTOS, but you'd have to contact
the manufacturer's of those products for details.

>(rhetorical question: How hard could it be to support V.M.?)

Rather hard, to do it properly. There are a lot of very poorly written
TOS programs that assume that logical addresses = physical addresses.
Not to mention that actually writing the VM management code is
nontrivial.

>Another topic I was wondering about was whether MiNT (and thus MultiTos)
>does the following: When a program is loaded, say program X. If the program
>is loaded again in another window / by another user / by a background shell
>script, will the operating system notice that it is already loaded and just
>use the copy in memory (but having a local stack and program pointers)

If the program was compiled so that it doesn't have any absolute
references to data (e.g. it uses an address register as a base pointer)
then this is possible. However, most programs cannot be so shared,
because they do contain absolute references (and thus every copy of
the program would share the same data and variables).

(gcc can compile shared text programs if it is given the -mbaserel
parameter)

Eric Smith	ersmith@netcom.com	ersmith@atari.uucp
I speak for myself, not for Atari.