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MiNT VM on Falcon
Hi all.
I am happy I am back to this list. The follwing notification has been sent
to Profesore, the author of MiNT VM kernel routines, but he seems to be
busy to deal with it. I hope however we should deal on further development
of VM kernel to make it stable and running at least on all 030 machines.
I managed to run MiNT VM on my 4 meg Falcon. Besides of the
ST_LEFT_AFTER_VM which needs to be changed to run on a 4 meg machine, i
needed to fix vm5.spp, because FAlcon IDE = SCSI dev. 16 (mask needs to be
changed from $0f to $1f). I am including also other changes i did in mint
(not much of them at all, only details).
On Falcon, VM is generally very unstable:
1) it doesn't start after a cold boot (?), the computer just locks up
after loading MiNT kernel. VM starts if you do a warm boot then.
2) the system is impossible to shutdown (a call to S_Shutdown() causes a
total lockup).
3) the system doesn't recognize the virtual memory as TT RAM (unlike in
the Outside). Even if it is running, the total/free amount of TT RAM is
indicated as zero. Outside indicated the total TT RAM as zero and the free
TT RAM as equal to the size of the swap. It is odd, but it works.
4) if you fill up the ST RAM with programs (so that any next program is
loaded to the VM), any program loaded this time crashes. I.e it bombs with
strangely low PC value (e.g. $11xxx or something similar). I have no idea,
what code is there (it may be NVDI or MiNT or any TSR).
5) programs loaded from shell terminate with bus error, abort signal,
signal 10 or 11 (i.e. bus error or address error)
6) if the VM works at all, it makes the computer horribly slow. It also
blocks the machine totally, so that you can't do anything.
7) one of the first things I did to run MiNT VM was AHDI 6.06
installation. No other driver works with it.
That's all. I tested it some day for two or three hours by night (all the
day i utilized to make the VM start at all).
It may be useful to hack up the XBIOS so that programs may not enable the
Blitter. AFAIk, only original TOS 4.04 VDI uses this chip to blit data.
All changes I did are available at:
http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~conradus/docs/mint.html
Bye
Draco