[Coco] Virtual Memory in OS-9

[Willard Goosey]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 02:59:27PM -0500, William Schaub wrote:

>if the operating system has calls for allocating more memory to a
>process, or if everything has to have memory allocated statically.
> 
No, you can brk() for more memory.  If that's not suffiencent, there
are ways to manually allocate more memory blocks, but then switching
between them becomes your problem.

> Also I really want to know if it's possible to execute programs that use 
> more memory than is physically installed by paging to mass storage of 
> some sort.

The Pascal compiler has a swapping p-code interpeter, otherwise, nope.

> It would be very nice if something similar to the UNIX mmap() system 
> call is available.

Nope.

> I saw a lot of unix tool ports on the rtsi archive so it cant be too 
> bad.  But I'm wondering if theres a way to make curses apps run on OS-9 

The curses library on rtsi is source-only and no one (that I know of)
has been able to get it to compile.  My personal opinion is that the
guy accidently uploaded the MS-DOS source he started with, not the
finished port. :-(

> does the OS-9 console emulate any particular type of terminal? (one that 
> implements escapes for character attributes, cursor movement and such) 

Yep.  Even the graphics can be completely controlled by
escape-sequences.  That's how the cgfx library (docs are in the
multivue manual) works.  

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko