<after Gavin after Frank>
    This is truly the essence of "evolving the OS", the basic tenant of MPE.
This would be like jumping to warp 9 from impulse power. HP corporate missed
the boat and in the right hands MPE will flourish.


               Eric Sand
               [log in to unmask]

----------------------------------------------------------------

Frank writes:
> Currently MPE and Posix processes can access each other's files.

Of course you'll still have Posix files inside the virtual 3000 environment
just as you do today, but these MPE "Posix" files (really just HFS named
files) will not (by default) have any interaction with the native host
environment that the emulator is running in.

> MPE running with Linux should retain that capability at least for
> bytestream files.

This is actually possible, though it's fairly deep rocket science.  We could
write an MPE intercept library for the file system intrinsics that would
redirect file access to native host files (maybe not MAPPED access though)
based perhaps on the file's path name (creating in effect a "mount point"
for the underlying system).

Going the other way could be done today using out NFS/iX package on the MPE
side that would let you mount the MPE file system from the Linux side.  This
is a good solution as it requires no special software, libraries, etc., on
the host side.

Other "magic" things we could do (given the resources) include dynamically
mapping the Linux filesystem to the MPE filesystem at the disk I/O level, or
by intercepting MPE at the VSM layer or something like that.  The great
thing about an emulator is that it gives you total command of the laws of
time and space as seen by the MPE operating system running under it, so we
can perform all sorts of magical things that would be utterly impossible on
a "real" 3000.

Gavin

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