Why no Contiki for Mac 68K?

[barana]

gavo, i'd like to port the lwip stack at first over to the lisa as it has no such stack or third party app so its forging new ground. them bring it over to the 128k and 512k my question is that with their respective recommended os' loaded, how much ran have we got to play with? and as i am really SLOW i would like to calborate on this he anyone is eager.

 

[z180]

UIP is to much reduced for me.

I would better port something like the uc/ip or the KA9Q that coherent and DOS used.

Contiki and the UIP stack are very different from what we know of OS working.

The Mac OS is able to being hooked by experts in various ways.

TCP/IP on 16bit systems is no innovation,it only is a bit shrinked.

2.9BSD for the PDP11 got the TCP/IP stack from the VAX 4.1cBSD.

 

[gavo]

gavo, i'd like to port the lwip stack at first over to the lisa as it has no such stack or third party app so its forging new ground. them bring it over to the 128k and 512k my question is that with their respective recommended os' loaded, how much ran have we got to play with? and as i am really SLOW i would like to calborate on this he anyone is eager.

I agree that if possible (and practical) this would be a better approach than porting say contiki. As you say tho, the issue is likely to be around how much free RAM is available once done, specifically for additional applications to be loaded to take advantage of this new IP stack. Having said that, this is only likely to be an issue for the 128K Mac, not the Lisa or 512K Mac - but I personally would like something that worked on the 128K - still perhaps this is just not possible (which is why I originally suggested Contiki, knowing that this has been ported to systems like the C64 - which I refuse to believe is better suited to this than a Mac - even a 128K one).

Unfortunately I am no programmer and so am likely to be of no help in coding or designing anything, although I guess I could be useful as a tester for the Mac stuff (no Lisa unfortunately however).

 

[Bunsen]

eCos might be a more worthy porting target. For starters, there's already a 68k port, albeit for later embedded 68ks, and it is currently developed, supported, and deployed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECos

eCos (embedded configurable operating system) is an open source, royalty-free, real-time operating system intended for embedded systems / It is designed to be customizable / programmed in the C programming language, and has compatibility layers and APIs for POSIX and µITRON./

eCos was designed for devices with memory size in the tens to hundreds of kilobytes / It can be used on hardware with too little RAM to support embedded Linux /

eCos runs on a wide variety of hardware platforms, including / Motorola 68000 / PowerPC /

eCos Porting Guide

One of the key aspects of eCos is its configuration system. It allows the programmer to control what functionality and features are included at runtime. Selecting from package modules, the programmer can layer different functionality, such as an Ethernet driver and networking support or a different scheduling algorithm, according to the needs of the application. Unwanted features can be eliminated easily to reduce the resource footprint. The configuration system also enables developers to employ third-party components to extend and enhance the functionality of the operating system.
eCos was designed for portability to a wide variety of 16-, 32-, and 64-bit processors and platforms. eCos is assembled from different components layered on each other to add the needed support for a given system. The base of this layered architecture is the hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Once the HAL has been ported to run on a given target's processor and any specific configuration needed for the target platform itself is added, eCos can be up and running quickly.

The only M68k port I can find is for the Coldfire. As I understand it from others' comments here, the Coldfire ISA is a subset of that for 680x0s, so my very rough guess is that a backport would be feasible. There would probably be a lot of custom coding involved to get peripheral device support (ethernet, serial, video, SCSI etc)

Course, you could just stick a IIe PDS card into a Mac and run Contiki on that :rambo:

 

[Bunsen]

A perhaps more viable solution than eCos would be (ironically) OS-9...

... no, not that one, this one. )

OS-9 is a family of real-time, process-based, multitasking, multi-user, Unix-like operating systems, developed in the 1980s for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. Today, OS-9 is both a Motorola 68000-series machine language OS and a portable version written in C.
In 1983, OS-9/6809 was ported to Motorola 68000 assembly language and extended. Versions of OS-9/68K run on a wide variety of 68000 family platforms, including the Sharp X68000 in Japan. It was also ported to the Atari ST.

Unfortunately, it's proprietary code. There's an open-source rewrite of the original 6809 version called NitrOS-9, with a GUI of sorts.

A couple of interesting snippets:

IIRC some years back Gibbs Ultrascience sold a port of OS/68000 v2.4 that ran under the then-current MacOS....

AFAIR in 1991/1992 the german distributor Dr. Keil sold a port of OS-9/68k V2.4 adapted to the Mac LC, LC II and some other actual Mac models. No emulation of OS-9, just running "native" OS-9, and not necessary to have MacOS booted.

Though it's built for a completely different CPU (Z80), and dependent on some of its specific features, SymbOS is pretty inspiring.

 

[trag]

And it probably worked much better in the day than when I tried it: http://www.vintagemacworld.com/512Knet.html

Ah, thanks for that. I had forgotten about Phil's page and there's a ton of good stuff on there.

The downside for a 68K mac version is that the machines that would benefit most (the 68000 compacts) all lack ethernet and EN/SC devices aren't exactly falling from the trees.

Ah, for a time machine. There was a period of a few months during which one Ebay seller was offering the EN/SC devices for about $10 and no one was buying them. He must have had at least ten of them. Of course, that was years ago, but certainly within the last ten.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I remember Ultrascience (though I remember Dr Gibbs as a separate company: perhaps they merged at some point). They sold 68K boards of their own that could run a great variety of operating systems, including d/os, Pick, OS-9 and most controversially AMOS (the Alpha Micro multi-user operating system), much to the ire of Alpha Microsystems. Only ever saw them in adverts; never seen one of their machines in the flesh.

 

[Bunsen]

Keil seem to still be in business: http://www.keil.com/

 

[Bunsen]

µcLinux has a 68k port, so, if you don't mind writing and/or porting drivers for basically everything, that would work. Probably.