🚀 go-pugleaf

Could somebody please give me some advice about available transputer
operating systems and which might be suitable for our purposes.

Here is a brief description of our setup which is primarily targeted at
machine vision applications.  Our system consists of several custom VME
based transputer boards running in a VME rack with Datacube pipeline
processing boards and an MVME 147 (68030) host CPU board.  We are using
the Microware  OS9 operating system. The transputers have only 1M of
standard  memory  and an additional 512K of shared memory (primarily
intended for images). One transputer (denoted TCM) is able to control
how the others access the shared memory and is able to set VME
interrupts and set up a C004 switch etc. I guess most of this information is 
irrelevant, the only significant point being that there is not
much memory available and we have some non-standard Hardware features
which we would like the operating system to control if possible. 

We have previously been developing code using the INMOS parallel C
toolset (the iserver was ported to OS9).

Some of the desirable characteristics we would like in our soon to be
purchased operating system are the following:

-  Real Time response.
-  Small (as only 1M of code memory is available).
-  Support for the  non standard facilities such as the registers to
   set up the access to shared memory.  I guess something analogous to a
   device driver is what I need here.
-  Compatibility with the sometime to be released T9000 
-  Some mechanism to support C004 switches 
-  some mechanism to support events
-  debugging support 
Note that these are only desirable properties probably only the 2nd one
is essential.

I am a little out of touch with what is currently available so any
advice would be appreciated.  Any appraisals/criticisms or comparisons of
the various operating systems would also be welcomed.

Many thanks 
Bob Valkenburg

Email bob@ida.dsir.govt.nz
Fax   +64-9-307 0618