From: tope@enea.se (Tommy Petersson)
Subject: Re: Commodore's SVR4 port for the Amiga
Organization: Enea Data AB
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL3
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 13:45:39 GMT

cmv@looney.ih.att.com (Craig M. Votava) writes:
: Gosh, with all of this heavy duty Dell SVR4 discussion going on, I feel like
: an underdog, voicing my meek little opinion of Commodore's SVR4 port to the
: Amiga 3000 platform.
: 
: Yes, Commodore, and no it's not a video game machine...
: 
: I've had my Amiga 3000 for almost 2 years now, running SVR4 (I don't know the
: USL version number, probably in the zero's) and am extremely happy with it.
: 
: HARDWARE:
: - The Amiga 3000 has a Motorola 68030 running at 25MHz with the 68882
: 	math-coprocessor, and all sorts of custom hardware gunk to make it
: 	run very quickly.
: 
: - The motherboard memory populated out to 18MB of RAM where 2MB is for
: 	graphics memory (120ns static column), and 16MB for program
: 	execution (80ns static column).
: 
: -I have 2 SCSI hard disks (Maxtor and Quantum) totalling about 400MB, and
: 	an Insite FLOPTICAL SCSI drive that handles 720K, 1.44M and 21M
: 	floppies. There's also a 120M SCSI QIC tape drive externally mounted.
: 
: -The video stuff includes a DMI resolver board and a HP1188A monitor which
: 	comfortably gives me 1280x1024 with 8-bit color.
: 
: -An Ethernet board
: 
: SOFTWARE:
: Commodore's port of SVR4 labeled "Amiga Version 2.1p2a" along with all of the
: great stuff they include, like X11R4 and X11R5 (beta version, but with
: the right patches, it runs fine) : binaries and source, public domain
: code out the wazoo : binaries and source, actual real live source code
: for all of the amiga device drivers, and probably a whole bunch of
: other stuff that I'm forgetting.
: 
: OPINIONS:
: I've had this setup running on my desk connecting me into our development
: network (mostly Sun SPARC's) and have been very happy with it. X11R5, NFS,
: sendmail, xrn, everything that is available for the Sun's works fine on the
: little 'ol AMIGA. It's not as fast as the SPARC's, but not too far behind
: either.

I have built the Eiffel development system on Amiga Unix, on a Fujitsu
1.2GB HD. The Eiffel docs says that this takes 3 hours on a Dec 3100 and
24 hours on an old Sun 3/60. I suspected 8-10 hours for the Amiga, but it
was completed at less than 4 hours.

: The only problem is that Commodore does not seem to be following up their
: Unix development very well (at all?), so I don't know what kind of support/
: upgrades will occur in the future, but realize that I have some old unix-pc/
: 7300/3b1 machine at home that I'm still using, so you can tell I strech out
: platform usefullness long after most folks start using them as planters and
: doorstops.

Their Unix crew is very small, but exists.

The interesting thing is to see if they come with a Unix port for their
new 68040 machines that also takes advantage of the new Advanced Graphics
chip set. This chip set is not near 1280x1024, but it would be a low-end
solution. A German developer is rumoured (it's a good backed-up rumour) to
have patched the existing Amiga Unix to work on a 68040-equipped Amiga 3000.

-- 
=============================================================================
 Tommy Petersson              tope@enea.se              Enea Data AB, Sweden
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Newsgroups: comp.unix.sys5.r4