Thanks for the links! Does Technical Introduction offer more information than the Guide to the Macintosh Family hardware? I have the latter, and it has lots of interesting information about the Mac SE/30. It's a pity that the info is scattered all over the book; I was thinking of copy-pasting the relevant info from each chapter as I read the book, and build an SE/30 specific text. I also have Inside Macintosh vols. 1 to 3, would volume 5 be useful? I know it has some details on the Macintosh II, which could help with the documentation of the ROM.
I am aware of MacMinix, but as mentioned it doesn't seem very helpful since it runs under MacOS; essentially it implements the kernel as a MacOS "process" (due to the fact that MacOS always runs in supervisor mode) and the calls to the sytem hardware simply are calls to MacOS and Toolbox. It's quite possible some parts of the ROM could be useful, if they can be safely used in an interrupt-based system (and this would help if someone where interested in having Minix run on anything else than an SE/30, though as I stated this is not one of my top priorities.)
I have worked extensively with the Atari ST version of Minix (up to the latest semi-official release, 1.6.25) and there are definitely some machine code snippets which will be useful, although that version specifically targets the 68000 processor, not any of its successors. I installed a 68010 in my STe, and modified some of the Minix assembly code to make use of the loop mode and get some speed improvements. I'll probably tinker with the ST assemby code and add 68030 features. But the other parts of the system are quite different.
Notice my reference Minix version will be 1.x, NOT the 2.x version described in the 2nd edition of Tanenbaum's book; the reason is that Minix 2.x is somewhat of a mess (as admitted by Tanenbaum himself
bloated, and hard to understand (which defeats the purpose of Minix, really.) I don't know much about Minix 3.x as I don't have the book, but it seems it's a sort of "return to the origins" though it's still bigger than 1.x. Add to this the fact that I will work mostly under A/UX 2.0 for development, whose compiler follows the earlier K&R standard rather than ANSI (which is required by Minix 3.x) and the conclusions are pretty clear: Minix 1.x is the easier route.
As I said, the project is mostly academic, something I will do in my (spare) free time; it has been years since I did any system-level development and I only recently got these Macs, so I want to see what I can "squeeze" out of them (and I am mostly intrigued by the SE/30) ;D
I am aware of MacMinix, but as mentioned it doesn't seem very helpful since it runs under MacOS; essentially it implements the kernel as a MacOS "process" (due to the fact that MacOS always runs in supervisor mode) and the calls to the sytem hardware simply are calls to MacOS and Toolbox. It's quite possible some parts of the ROM could be useful, if they can be safely used in an interrupt-based system (and this would help if someone where interested in having Minix run on anything else than an SE/30, though as I stated this is not one of my top priorities.)
I have worked extensively with the Atari ST version of Minix (up to the latest semi-official release, 1.6.25) and there are definitely some machine code snippets which will be useful, although that version specifically targets the 68000 processor, not any of its successors. I installed a 68010 in my STe, and modified some of the Minix assembly code to make use of the loop mode and get some speed improvements. I'll probably tinker with the ST assemby code and add 68030 features. But the other parts of the system are quite different.
Notice my reference Minix version will be 1.x, NOT the 2.x version described in the 2nd edition of Tanenbaum's book; the reason is that Minix 2.x is somewhat of a mess (as admitted by Tanenbaum himself
bloated, and hard to understand (which defeats the purpose of Minix, really.) I don't know much about Minix 3.x as I don't have the book, but it seems it's a sort of "return to the origins" though it's still bigger than 1.x. Add to this the fact that I will work mostly under A/UX 2.0 for development, whose compiler follows the earlier K&R standard rather than ANSI (which is required by Minix 3.x) and the conclusions are pretty clear: Minix 1.x is the easier route.As I said, the project is mostly academic, something I will do in my (spare) free time; it has been years since I did any system-level development and I only recently got these Macs, so I want to see what I can "squeeze" out of them (and I am mostly intrigued by the SE/30) ;D