A/UX 2.0 and old EtherPortII card??

Kent Sandvik ksand at Apple.COM
Thu Jan 10 04:53:12 AEST 1991


In article <2813 at redstar.cs.qmw.ac.uk> liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) writes:

>>Device drivers written under A/UX 1.1 won't work with A/UX 2.0, because a 
>couple
>>of kernel structures are different. I.e. the company/persons behind the
>>driver should simply recompile the driver(s) under A/UX 2.0 with the new
>>A/UX 2.0 device driver kit files.
>
>The A/UX 1.1 version of the driver works with A/UX 2.0 but doesn't support 
>AppleTalk - it's fine for NFS, TCP/IP and so on. I'd be happy to send a copy 
>of the 1.1 driver binary to apple.com for people to fetch as needed, but only 
>if the present owners of the rights to that code give their consent: you could 
>try asking them for the 1.1 drivers anyway.


OK, I'm quoting the A/UX 2.0 device driver manual:

If you wrote a device driver for an earlier relase of the A/UX operating
system, you should recompile it under A/UX release 2.0. Recompilation is
necessary because *kernel data structures*, such as the user structure
and the proc structure, have changed size and location within the kernel.

Configuring a driver object that has not been recompiled under A/UX 2.0
into a 2.0 kernel may cause the system to crash when the driver is called.

Just to add to this, there are some other important issues:

Concering the fx IOPs, there are some issues with the serial device
drivers that assume they talk with an SCC.

A/UX 2.0 supports the serial Manager (with the exception of asynchronous
I/O !).

The virtual memory code is rewritten, the call sptalloc() is no longer
available.

Some of the old slot manager driver routines are no longer available in 2.0
where the Toolbox Slot Manager is supported.

The line discipline routine ttopen() is modified in order to comform to
the POSIX Standard concerning the oflag from open(2).

The memory maps are modified, there's a separate user and kernel address
space.

Anyway, I recommend to purchase the new A/UX 2.0 device driver manual/kit
for those working with drivers for A/UX. I would personally recompile any
drivers from 1.1 and run them for a while before I would sleep during nights.
Eventually there are 1.1 drivers that work without problems under 2.0
as well, but it's better to be sure and just recompile the code.

BTW the manual should be available from APDA.

Hope this helps,
Kent Sandvik, DTS

-- 
Kent Sandvik, Apple Computer Inc, Developer Technical Support
NET:ksand at apple.com, AppleLink: KSAND  DISCLAIMER: Private mumbo-jumbo
Zippy++ says: "C++, anything less is BCPL..."



More information about the Comp.unix.aux mailing list