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Message-ID: <365@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: Mon, 20-Jul-87 13:12:41 EDT
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Posted: Mon Jul 20 13:12:41 1987
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From: Glen Overby 

Subject: Fixing the tty driver

Last night I applied Andy Valencia's serial port driver to Minix 1.2.
Looking at this implementation, which seems to follow Tanenbaum's ideas,
gives me the impression that it is essentially a fall-back to a monolithic
system.

The way I propose to clean up the TTY driver is to convert the TTY task
to a streams system.  The Unix streams system described by Dennis
Ritche[1] uses message passing between streams processors. Since Minix
already has message passing, streams could be implemented as a set of server
processes.  There are a few problems with this. First, Minix's messages
do not queue. There will have to be either some sort of queueing within
the streams processors or something. Streams will also increase the number
of messages being passed.

What ever happened to mpx (multiplexed) files? I would think that they
would be ideal for windowing systems (or at least mpx devices).

Opinions?

References:
[1] "A Stream Input-Output System" D. M. Ritchie BSTJ V63 No. 8 (Oct '84).

-----------
Glen Overby
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