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Bibliography & Sources

This page is the master source list behind grimoire-amix. It splits into primary sources (the Ditto driver paper, the three install floppies we analyse locally, the four modern driver repos, AT&T's SVR4 documentation, and the scanned Commodore manuals on archive.org) and community / reference sources (amigaunix.com, encyclopedias, blogs, Usenet, emulator issue trackers, and the emulator docs). Every docs/ page ends with its own ## Sources list citing the specific items below; this page is where those citations resolve.

The hierarchy we apply everywhere, per the contributor contract: primary manuals / the Ditto driver paper / the real disk images and repo source > archived Usenet (comp.unix.amiga) > forum lore. Confidence tags (✅ verified, 🟡 community-reported, 🔴 unverified/disputed) are carried from the research brief into every page; this page is mostly a catalogue, so it is lightly tagged.

Licensing note (read before downloading anything). ✅ The Amix distribution, the boot/root/patch floppy images, the hardfiles, tape images, and the scanned manuals are proprietary Commodore material, treated as abandonware but not licensed for redistribution. We never commit them to this repository (they are .gitignored) and we never tell you to. We refer to them by name and checksum and point you at amigaunix.com and archive.org to obtain them yourself. All tooling in this repo operates on user-supplied images.

Primary sources

These are the top of the source-of-truth hierarchy. When a primary source and forum lore disagree, the primary source wins.

The Ditto driver paper

  • Michael Ditto, Writing Amix Device Drivers — presented at the 1990 European Amiga Developer's Conference. ✅ This is the authoritative driver specification, written by the Amix porter himself ("Unix Systems Software Architect" at Commodore, 1988–1991). It grounds the driver model, the char-driver walkthrough, and the STREAMS-driver walkthrough.
  • Citation caveat ✅: cite it as the 1990 European Amiga Developer's Conference — the page headers in the PDF read exactly that. The local PDF filename says "North American," which is inaccurate; do not propagate it.
  • Edition caveat ✅: the scan has 22 unique pages; pages 23–44 are a duplicate re-scan of the same content. The par(7A) man page (the worked char-driver example) is on p. 22. Cite specific page numbers from the first 22-page run (e.g. "Ditto paper p. 22").
  • Held locally as sources/pdf/Writing Amix Device Drivers …(2).pdf. Not redistributable — obtain via amigaunix.com / archive.org. SHA-256 in sources/CHECKSUMS.txt.

The three install floppies (our local analysis)

The differentiator of this project: we inspect the real Amix 2.1 install media with tools/inspect-adf.sh <image> and ground the boot-disk anatomy pages on byte-level findings rather than lore. All three are proprietary, gitignored, and obtained by the reader — checksums live in sources/CHECKSUMS.txt.

Image (gitignored) What it is Grounds
amix_21_boot.adf ✅ AmigaDOS OFS bootblock + Amix secondary bootstrap + compressed install kernel anatomy-boot-adf
amix_21_root.adf ✅ UFS miniroot: installer ELF (m68k) binaries + install shell scripts anatomy-root-adf, install walkthrough
amix_21_patch.adf ✅ Self-extracting "Patch Disks 1 & 2" for Amix SVR4 2.1 (→ kernel 2.1c) anatomy-patch-adf

Cite local analysis in the form "amix_21_root.adf analysis via tools/inspect-adf.sh" so any reader can reproduce the finding against their own copy. The deeper unpack of the root miniroot uses tools/unpack-root.sh.

The four modern driver repositories

All four are recent, AI-assisted hobby drivers targeting Amix 2.1p2a on an Amiga 3000 / 68030 / Zorro II. ✅ Their READMEs and source ground the driver case studies and much of the driver model. All are source-only (building them needs a licensed Amix install and headers).

Repository What it is Case study
https://github.com/asokero/va2000-amix ✅ Char framebuffer driver for the MNT VA2000 RTG card (/dev/va2000, char major 68) va2000
https://github.com/asokero/xrtg-amix ✅ X11R5 server (Xrtg) for the VA2000 (needs the va2000 driver) xrtg
https://github.com/asokero/lszorro-amix ✅ Userspace lspci-style Zorro II scanner lszorro
https://github.com/isoriano1968/hydra-amix ✅ STREAMS/DLPI network driver for the Hydra AmigaNet card (cdevsw slot 47, hya); now also carries a slice of the Amix /usr/sys kernel + boot source tree. 2026-06: verified on real hardware (ARP + ICMP ping) — "believed to be the first working Amix net driver for the card" 🟡 hydra
https://github.com/vjouppi/hydra 🟡 Ville Jouppi's AmigaOS Hydra reverse-engineering (register offsets, board schematics); cited by the hydra-amix README hydra

🟡 An earlier research note claimed "asokero handle not found / isoriano1968 only does AmigaOS Mesa." That note is wrong — these four repos exist and are the project's centerpiece examples. 🟢 The modern drivers build natively on the box (Hydra: make/make force with GCC 2.7.2.3, an amigaunix.com pkg). The m68k-amix-gcc cross-compiler still has no public build recipe 🔴, but that gap is moot — see the toolchain page. 🔴 Do not propagate: the hydra-amix README states Amix was "later sold by Haage & Partner." This conflicts with the sourced history (Commodore; support ended 1993, bankruptcy 1994 — H&P is the AmigaOS-3.5/3.9 era, unrelated). Treat it as upstream lore, not fact. See versions.

AT&T SVR4 documentation

Because Amix is "essentially identical to System V Release 4," the generic AT&T SVR4 manuals are authoritative for everything the Ditto paper does not cover specifically. ✅

  • AT&T SVR4 DDI/DKI Reference Manual (Device Driver Interface / Driver–Kernel Interface) — the reference for kernel APIs Amix drivers call (copyin/copyout, uiomove, sleep/wakeup, timeout/untimeout, the cdevsw/bdevsw switch structures, and so on).
  • AT&T SVR4 Streams Programmer's Guide and Network Programmer's Guide — the references for STREAMS and TLI, which ground the STREAMS-driver walkthrough and networking.
  • Books the Ditto paper cites as background: Egan & Teixeira, Writing a UNIX Device Driver (Wiley, 1988); Bach, The Design of the UNIX Operating System (1986); Kernighan & Pike, The UNIX Programming Environment (1984).
  • 🔴 No Amix-specific Programmer's Guide or Driver Reference has been found archived. Use the generic SVR4 DDI/DKI plus the Ditto paper; do not cite an "Amix Driver Reference" that does not exist.

Scanned Commodore manuals (archive.org)

✅ The official end-user manuals, scanned and hosted on the Internet Archive (proprietary; view/download from archive.org, do not redistribute through this repo):

Community & reference sources

These are credible but, per the hierarchy, rank below the primary sources. Most claims grounded only here carry a 🟡 tag in the docs.

amigaunix.com (the authoritative community resource)

amigaunix.com is a DokuWiki and the most authoritative community resource for end-user, historical, and install-media material. grimoire-amix cross-links to it rather than duplicating it — we go deeper on development. The pages we cite:

🟡 Where amigaunix.com conflicts with a less authoritative community source — for example the X11R4-vs-R5 "default" question — we follow amigaunix.com (it says R4 is the default) and flag the conflict. See X11 and the desktop.

Encyclopedias

🔴 Some wiki pages assert an "Amix 2.2" release and a "2.1c, 1994" date. Both are almost certainly wrong: 2.2 does not appear in any primary source (likely confusion with kernel 2.1c), and support ended in 1993. See the versions reference.

Articles & blogs

Usenet & forums (archived)

Per the hierarchy, archived comp.unix.amiga ranks above general forum lore.

  • comp.unix.amiga — the period Usenet group, via Google Groups and narkive archives 🟡 (tape-free install procedures, networking workarounds, contemporary user reports).
  • English Amiga Board (EAB) threads — 🟡 (the 3B2-codebase discussion, hardware lore).

Emulator issue trackers & documentation

These ground the getting-started / emulation pages.

  • WinUAE documentation — the reference emulation target; MMU emulation since 2.6.0 (2013). ✅ that MMU/FPU on and JIT off are required; several config values are 🟡. See emulation under WinUAE.
  • FS-UAE documentation — verified by amigaunix.com against FS-UAE 3.1.66 🟡. See emulation under FS-UAE.
  • Amiberry issue #1376 — https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amiberry/issues/1376 — request to add A3000 SCSI controller + tape support for Amix; implemented in Amiberry 8.x (the 8.1.6 GUI mounts a disk at A3000 SCSI ID 6 and a tape at ID 4), so Amiberry now both installs and runs Amix ✅. See emulation under Amiberry.

The llms.txt convention

This repository follows the llms.txt convention — a root-level, curated, Markdown index of the site intended for LLM consumption, proposed by Jeremy Howard (Answer.AI), September 2024 (https://llmstxt.org/). ✅ In this repo:

  • llms.txt (repo root) is the curated LLM index; keep it in sync when you add, rename, or move a page.
  • llms-full.txt is the concatenated full corpus, regenerated by tools/gen-llms-full.sh after content changes.

See writing for LLMs for how this shapes page structure.

How to cite these sources on a page

Each docs/ page ends with a ## Sources list pointing at the specific items above. Use these forms so a reader (human or agent) can resolve and reproduce them:

  • Ditto paper — Ditto paper p. N (page from the first 22-page run; e.g. Ditto paper p. 22).
  • Local image analysis — amix_21_root.adf analysis via tools/inspect-adf.sh (and tools/unpack-root.sh for the deeper miniroot unpack).
  • Repos — the full GitHub URL (e.g. https://github.com/asokero/va2000-amix).
  • Brief — research brief §N (sources/research-brief.md) for the internal grounding section.
  • Community — the full URL (amigaunix.com page, Wikipedia, blog, EAB/Usenet, emulator issue).

See also

Sources