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Expanding the OS/8 device slot table size

BitWiz

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2021
Messages
419
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Glen Ellyn, Iil
OS/8 can only handle 178 (15) devices in it's device slot table.

I haven't looked at the source code yet but I was wondering if it would be possible to expand that to 37
8 (31) device slots. Or is there a better OS for me to be using on the my 8/E?

This would also include increasing the number of block slots as well.

That way, once I have everything working, I can have the following devices all at once:

01 SYS RKA0
02 DSK RKB0
03 DTA0 TD8E
04 DTB0 TD8E
05 RXA0 RX8E (RX02)
06 RXB0 RX8E (RX02)

07 RKA0 RK8E
10 RKB0 RK8E
11 RKA1 RK8E
12 RKB1 RK8E
13 SDA0 SerialDisk
14 SDA1 Serial Disk
15 SDB0 SerialDisk
16 SDB1 Serial Disk
17 SDC0 SerialDisk
20 SDC1 Serial Disk
21 SDD0 SerialDisk
22 SDD1 Serial Disk
23 BAT BAT
24 PTP PC8E
25 PTR PC8E
26 TTY TTY
 
I don't know how difficult this would be to change. It would at a minimum require changes to OS8 RESORC, and BUILD. It might require moving overlay locations around on the system image as the sizes of tables change. It might require increasing the size of the system area on the system device. Your list would use 11 or maybe 12 pages out of the 32 in field 0 if you managed to load all of them at the same time.

I don't know of another OS for the 8 that supported all that stuff.
 
The late Charles Lasner used to lament that unit numbers were never implemented in OS/8. Then you'd only need a slot per driver, not a slot for every unit. (There is a mostly unused place for a unit number in the driver calling convention, but it was never used that way.)

Vince
 
The late Charles Lasner used to lament that unit numbers were never implemented in OS/8. Then you'd only need a slot per driver, not a slot for every unit. (There is a mostly unused place for a unit number in the driver calling convention, but it was never used that way.)

Vince

Vince,

I guess the answer is to use P?S8 😁

My other solution is to have multiple boot images of OS/8 configured for different drivers.
 
I guess the answer is to use P?S8 😁
Alas, P?S8 isn't much like OS/8. Each system does come with a system device handler which typically supports up to 8 units. Non-system drivers are there, but there are only a couple of utilities that know how to use them, and those utilities are mostly meant for media/file format translation.

The rest of the system will seem quite odd to an OS/8 user. The user files are all 4K long, the text files all have line numbers, file names are short and don't have extensions, etc.

Vince
 
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