Subject: Linux-Development Digest #289
From: Digestifier <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 94 06:13:09 EDT

Linux-Development Digest #289, Volume #2         Tue, 11 Oct 94 06:13:09 EDT

Contents:
  Re: Alpha Linux (Linus Torvalds)
  Re: A badly missed feature in gcc (H. Peter Anvin)
  1.1.53 Wont compile AHA152x.c (Michael J. Tanenhaus)
  Re: Unable to find XF86-3.1-lib.tar.gz with correct sum. (Orest Zborowski)
  Re: NCR53c810 card and Technoland ([email-masked])
  Re: Linux For Mac (Alan Cox)
  libgen and libw ?? ([email-masked])
  Filesystem idea (Riku Saikkonen)
  Re: A badly missed feature in gcc (Greg Comeau)
  max file size feature? (Kai Kretschmann)
  Comeau C++ 3.0.1 With Templates BETA for LINUX (Greg Comeau)
  Re: Orchid CDS-3110 CD-ROM (Jeff Kesselman)
  [Bug?] S3 805 Only In 80x25 (S L Herbert)
  Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS (Chris Bitmead)
  Re: writing a file system (Chris Bitmead)
  Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS (Patrick Schaaf)
  Re: Large IDE Drive support (Dougal Campbell)
  problem accessing floppies with 1.1.52 (Peter Bouthoorn)

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

From: [email-masked] (Linus Torvalds)
Subject: Re: Alpha Linux
Date: 10 Oct 1994 18:25:13 +0200

In article <[email-masked]>,
Chris Bitmead <[email-masked]> wrote:
>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Andrew Bulhak) writes:
>
>>Jay Ashworth ([email-masked]) wrote:
>>: [email-masked] (Andrew Bulhak) writes:
>>: >: Only if Linux on the Alpha will be a 64-bit-OS. If it will be, I hope
>>: >: that they do not repeat the OSF/1 idiocy of having only 32-bit ints.
>>
>>: A posting in cola about a week ago said that it would be a 32-bit os, with
>>: access to long-longs.
>>
>>Is that Linus' Alpha Linux or the DEC port?
>
>Linus' port is 64 bit. The DEC port is 32 bit.

Just to clear things up a bit: there are indeed two different parties
working on this, but we really shouldn't talk about two different ports. 
It's more a matter of different approaches, and the port done by Jim
Paradis is certainly 32-bit.  This isn't as bad as it sounds: it just
means that the user-level VM is limited to about 2GB, as the Alpha
really is a native 64 bit chip and doesn't have separate 32/64 bit
modes. 

[ small plug for the Alpha: I don't know about others, but I think the
  Alpha chip is a helluva good chip.  *Very* nice design ]

The port by Jim is going to be ready earlier, and I'm not quite stupid
enough to ignore what he has done: I expect the final Alpha port to be
quite heavily influenced on his work.  I want to use the 64-bit version
of gcc to compile the eventual alpha-linux, not so much to break the 2GB
VM barrier as just to catch out some of the worst 32-bitisms in the
current kernel.  Jim didn't want to worry about those right now. 

In short, it's not "Linus vs DEC", but just stages of development and
different goals: Jim primarily wants a linux port to the Alpha, while my
main motivation is to play around with a very nice (and different and
FAST) machine.  I hope the end result will be a well-balanced system ;-)

                Linus

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

From: [email-masked] (H. Peter Anvin)
Subject: Re: A badly missed feature in gcc
Reply-To: [email-masked] (H. Peter Anvin)
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 05:35:51 GMT

Followup to:  <wcreator.781567812@kaiwan009>
By author:    [email-masked] (Steven M. Doyle)
In newsgroup: comp.os.linux.development
>
> In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Thomas Koenig) writes:
> 
> >David Taylor ([email-masked]) wrote in comp.os.linux.development,
> >     article <[email-masked]>:
> >>I wish gcc for Linux could handle // comments.
> >I don't ;-)
> >This would break perfectly correct C code, like
> >    a = b//* Comment here */ c
> 
> IMHO, that 3would be poor style at best... :)  I also miss the //
> comments and would 
>  like to see them included in future versions of gcc.  They make --
> amongt other things -- 
> removing lines for debugging purposes a lot easier.
> 

I think a repost is in order:

To enable this feature, edit the file
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/2.5.8/specs thusly:

Add to the line following the line saying "*cpp:":
%{!ansi:-lang-c++}

DO NOT use -lang-c-c++-comments as someone suggested; it will break
compiling C++ programs!

I have been told a future version of GCC 2.6.x will support the
command line option:

-Wp,-lang-c-c++-comments

(Incidentally, I got the patches against the then-latest alpha within
12 hours of sending this suggestion to the gcc-bugs mailing list!
Talk about support!)

-- 
INTERNET: [email-masked]             --- Allah'u'abha ---
IBM MAIL: I0050052 at IBMMAIL     HAM RADIO:   N9ITP or SM4TKN
FIDONET:  1:115/511 or 1:115/512  STORMNET:    181:294/1 or 181:294/101
WWW hyplan available at <http://www.eecs.nwu.edu/hpa/plan.html>

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

From: [email-masked] (Michael J. Tanenhaus)
Subject: 1.1.53 Wont compile AHA152x.c
Date: 11 Oct 1994 01:21:52 GMT

Subject says it all. I get a GCC internal error on this file now.

Gcc2.6.0

--

--
--
***********************************************************************
*   Michael J. Tanenhaus                  "What?? It doesnt work?     *
*                                              You dont SAY!"         *
*        CIRC Tech                                                    *
*   [email-masked]                                         *
***********************************************************************

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

From: [email-masked] (Orest Zborowski)
Subject: Re: Unable to find XF86-3.1-lib.tar.gz with correct sum.
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 23:07:41 GMT

Kevin Ruland ([email-masked]) wrote:

>I've searched the world over to find the X11R6 libs and can't find one
>with the correct checksum.  gunzip even pukes on it.  It seems okay
>up to ./lib/libX11.so.6

>I've tried the following sites:

>x.physics.su.oz.au
>xfree86.cdrom.com
>sunsite.unc.edu
>ftp.xfree86.org
>tsx-11.mit.edu

>Were's the good one.

>Kevin Ruland
>[email-masked]

The upload was corrupted in transit. I've re-uploaded a version on 10/7
to xfree86.org. It should propagate to the mirror sites very soon.

-orest

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

From: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: NCR53c810 card and Technoland
Date: 10 Oct 1994 23:41:20 -0400
Reply-To: [email-masked]

|via anonymous ftp at ftp.netcom.com) is one vendor who sells this card
|(for approxmiately $75 -- at least they did as of a few weeks ago).
|This card works with Linux as long as your motherboard has BIOS support
|for the NCR chip (or so I'm told).  I think that both the ASUS motherboards
|and the "Intel PCI Premier II" have the proper support (don't know about
|others).
|
|-John

I don't know about "pure" Intel motherboards but I have a Gateway 2K P5-90
(which is supposed to be an Intel Plato MB) and the $68 card from Technoland
does NOT work in it.  (Nice of them to tell you before you bought it though.)
I've tried several BIOS versions both from Intel and Gateway without any luck.
(Some worse than others: Floppy drive?  What floppy drive?  I don't have a
floppy drive. :)  GW 2K apparantly had the NCR for a short time but then it
was removed.  I have some docs on the MB from Intel but they don't mention
NCR anywhere.  I'm seriously considering a Nextor card which is supposed to
have the BIOS on the card.  Any one have any experiences with these?  Anybody
want the Technoland card, cheap?

Alan P.

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

From: [email-masked] (Alan Cox)
Subject: Re: Linux For Mac
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 1994 16:40:52 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Henry Ware) writes:
>Whats to tell?  The Linux FAQ lists no 68k mac ports, GNU doesn't support 
>Apple (because of Apple's "look and feel" lawsuits), and I haven't heard 
>of any (except for the PowerMac port).  

The Linux FAQ is wrong then. There are ports going on as follows

M68K    -       running nicely, new one also has networking up
DEC Alpha
Power PC
MIPS R4000

I keep hearing rumours about people playing with an idea of porting it to
one of the Acorn ARM machines but have no concrete info on that one

Alan

-- 
  ..-----------,,----------------------------,,----------------------------,,
 // Alan Cox  //  [email-masked]   //  GW4PTS@GB7SWN.#45.GBR.EU  //
 ``----------'`----------------------------'`----------------------------''

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

From: [email-masked]
Subject: libgen and libw ??
Date: 8 Oct 94 19:06:36 EST

I have been fooling around compiling code on a Linux system and have
a program that calls for libgen and libw (-lgen -lw).  Does anyone
know what these libraries are (from)?

-Fred Heitkamp
please E-Mail.  Thanks!!

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

Subject: Filesystem idea
From: [email-masked] (Riku Saikkonen)
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 94 20:17:00 +0200

Got this odd idea the other day...

Some 'temporary file' capability for the filesystems might be a good
thing. For example, with an oft-compiled largish application, it's good
to keep the .o files in the directory(/-ies). But they fill up disk
space... What I'm suggesting is some sort of 'temp file' attribute that
would keep the file on disk until space runs low. Then, when the disk
space is almost 0, it would start deleting the temp files to free space.

Files like .o, perhaps some other temporary files, files converted to
another format for speed but with the original file still lying around,
things like that might benefit from this...

I know, this isn't too easy to implement. I don't have time for it. And
I'm not even sure if this would be that useful. But if some filesystem
expert feels bored... :)

-=- Rjs -=- [email-masked] - IRC: Rjs
"From cavern pale the moist moon eyes / the white mists that from earth
arise / to hide the morrow's sun and drip / all the grey day from each
twig's tip." - J. R. R. Tolkien

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

From: [email-masked] (Greg Comeau)
Subject: Re: A badly missed feature in gcc
Date: 11 Oct 1994 02:05:11 -0400
Reply-To: [email-masked] (Greg Comeau)

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Jeff Kesselman) writes:
>And this is the cannonical case of why c++ is NOT a true super-set of 
>ANSI c.  (Thanks, I'm going to save the exampel for the next time I have 
>THAT argument.)

Anybody defending that C++ is a _true_ super-set of C is obviously wrong.
There are quite a number of things that make it an "improper" superset.

- Greg
-- 
       Comeau Computing, 91-34 120th Street, Richmond Hill, NY, 11418-3214
 Here:[email-masked] / BIX:comeau or [email-masked] / CIS:72331,3421
    Voice:718-945-0009 / Fax:718-441-2310 / Prodigy: tshp50a / WELL: comeau

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

From: [email-masked] (Kai Kretschmann)
Subject: max file size feature?
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 1994 19:26:17 GMT

Hello,

Once upon a time I saw a nice feature on a midrange systems file
system: You could define a maximum file size in blocks for one
file and every append on that file didn't made it grow. Some
sort of wraparound. Didn't this might be a good feature for ext2?
One could define a max size of 50k for a logfile and never check
again where all the space has gone.

Any ideas, pros, cons?

-- 
Kai Kretschmann,
  >>>   FidoNet:  2:2461/312, 21:491/1161, 16:100/6006   <<<
  >>>   Internet: [email-masked]              <<<
  >>>   FAX/BBS:  +49-6172-305379                        <<<

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

From: [email-masked] (Greg Comeau)
Subject: Comeau C++ 3.0.1 With Templates BETA for LINUX
Date: 11 Oct 1994 02:16:16 -0400
Reply-To: [email-masked] (Greg Comeau)

Last week at UNIX EXPO we announced Comeau C++ for LINUX.
Also there, at the NY LINUX User's Group meeting, I made a request
for beta sites.  We hope to begin shipping by November 1 and we
are still looking for 2 or 3 more beta sites.  If you are
interested, please email me.  YOU MUST BE SERIOUS!
Please say why you are interested, what you will be testing
it with/for, where your interests in this lay, etc.
As we only need 2 or 3 more sites, please do not consider
a negative response as a personal rejection or a source of
flaming.  Thanks.

- Greg
-- 
       Comeau Computing, 91-34 120th Street, Richmond Hill, NY, 11418-3214
 Here:[email-masked] / BIX:comeau or [email-masked] / CIS:72331,3421
    Voice:718-945-0009 / Fax:718-441-2310 / Prodigy: tshp50a / WELL: comeau

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

From: [email-masked] (Jeff Kesselman)
Subject: Re: Orchid CDS-3110 CD-ROM
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 20:33:02 GMT

In article <nugent.781475145@phyast>,
Peter Nugent <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I've recently purchased a pentium computer from Comtrade that has a brand
>new Orchid CDS-3100 CD-ROM on it. The cdrom manual says it supports both
>Mitsumi and Sony interface standards. I have compiled kernels with both
>these drivers and the results are as follows.
>

I've got bad news for you, I'm afraid.  I have one of these too, which 
I've instaleld in various op systems and at thsi poitn know ALOT about...

1) What you REALLY have is a Wearnes CD-ROM and (if you are using the 
orchid interface) a Wernes sony act-alike interface.  The drive is
ELCTRONICLY compatable with the sony interface BUT

2) The Wearnes is NOT compatable on a software level with the sony 
drives.  It uses a different control protocol.  Any driver written for 
the sony drives will NOT work with this drive.  You need a Wearnes 
specific driver.

3) As far as I know (and this may be outdated info) nobody has written a 
Wearnes driver for Linux.

Your choices are:
A) Install some other way (the yygdrasil has a slow but functional method 
of reaching ANY dos compatable cd-rom drive through its dos driver.  
Unfortunately, this means 'thunking' values down to 16 bit and dropping 
otu of proteted mode, all this slows performance way down.)  After you 
have our Linux installed, see if you can get the necessary info out of 
Wearnes and hack the sony driver to work with it.

B) Get a new drive.  (This is what i did.  I bought a Sony 33A (which is 
a cheap OEM version of the 31a and fully compatable with it.  I bought 
mine in a 'Media Magic' package for about $129.00)

Sorry I don't have more upbeat info for you.

Jeff Kesselman

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

From: [email-masked] (S L Herbert)
Subject: [Bug?] S3 805 Only In 80x25
Date: 8 Oct 1994 09:20:47 GMT

A friend of mine recently bought a no-name video card which has the S3 805
chipset.  He is unable to change the text-mode on boot-up from 80x25, with
the Linux 1.1.50 kernel.  

Stuart
--
Stuart Herbert            Academic Computing Services, University of Sheffield
UNIX Support                  (0114) 282 4254 (External) / Ext 4254 (Internal)

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

From: [email-masked] (Chris Bitmead)
Subject: Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS
Date: 9 Oct 94 16:30:52

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Hugh Strong) writes:

>Rob Janssen ([email-masked]) wrote:
>: In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Hugh Strong) writes:
>
>: >Just wondering -
>
>: >How does the performance of Linux  ext2fs compare with that of 
>: >the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS) found in {386,Free,Net}BSD and other
>: >BSD variants?  A number of posts to the 386BSD groups have recently
>: >sneered at ext2fs, presumably because of the considerations FFS makes for
>: >drive geometry and rotational parameters, which  seem to be absent in the
>: >ext2fs source I've examined.   Does anyone have any concrete performance
>: >statistics to back/refute a these claims?  Is anyone workrking on 
>: >FFS for Linux?
>
>: Well, the Linux community sneers at BSD for doing synchronous inode
>: updates, which you won't find in ext2fs :-)
>: Those can really kill performance when you are manipulating a lot of
>: files, like in a news system.
>
>: Conclusion: The filesystems have different characteristics, and the
>: performance will vary with the operations you are doing.  When you want
>: to know what will perform best in your situation, try them both.
>
>: But please don't try to setup a war between the two camps!
>
>I think it's important to keep in perspective that performance 
>is only one aspect of the equation.  It may be reasonable to 
>compare ext2fs to FFS on this basis, but FFS dates from about
>(I think) 4.1 or 4.2 BSD.  I think the issue today is flexibility
>as much as it is performance.
>
>Ext2fs supports a limited set of extended attributes (append, immutable,
>secure delete, uneraseable, synchronous) and the sources indicate
>that ACLs will be available in the future.  But these are all 
>kernel space extensions.  You can't associate some arbitrary piece
>of data (that stays with the file when copied) with the file without
>writing it in the data stream somewhere.  By contrast, HPFS allows
>up to 64K of extended attributes per file.  NTFS goes the full 
>distance by allowing multiple arbitrary streams per file, although
>there doesn't seem to be any documentation on how to exploit this
>in the Win32 API manual.
>
>I know this doesn't sound very UNIXy, but how difficult would
>it be to implement a filesystem with some sort of arbitrary
>extended attributes like those in NTFS or the more limited ones
>in HPFS?  

Not very hard to do, but why clutter up the operating system with more
features, when directories will do exactly what you want?

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

From: [email-masked] (Chris Bitmead)
Subject: Re: writing a file system
Date: 9 Oct 94 16:41:45

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (John West) writes:

>Anyone got any wise words?  I'd like to write a fs for Linux, partly for
>the experience, and partly because I think a compressing fs would be a
>Good Thing.  I've looked at the KHG, but it doesn't seem to say anything
>about it.
>
>I could always read the source for one of the standard ones, and figure it
>out from there, but this doesn't seem a terribly reliable way of doing
>things.

There is a userfs package for writing file systems in user space. If
nothing else it should make it easier to debug.

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

From: [email-masked] (Patrick Schaaf)
Subject: Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS
Date: 10 Oct 1994 17:22:39 -0000

[email-masked] (Hugh Strong) writes:

>For instance, to open the main (data) fork of a file, one
>might write
>               fd = open("MyDataFile",O_RDONLY);
>The icon (for a window manager) for the file could be
>accessed by the following call.
>               fd1 = open("MyDataFile:ICON",O_RDONLY);

That's a perfectly valid filename; why waste one character?

                fd1 = open("MyDataFile/ICON",O_RDONLY);

If memory serves, this is the way CAP, a Mac filesystem on Unix package,
maps Mac file forks.

Patrick

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

From: [email-masked] (Dougal Campbell)
Subject: Re: Large IDE Drive support
Date: 9 Oct 1994 03:15:30 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>, David Edelman said something like:
> Is anyone working on being able to use > 1024 Cylinders on an IDE drive?

Ftp Patrick LoPresti's big-ide-HOWTO file from ftp.iquest.com.

-- 
Dougal Campbell          | Check out the interQuest home page:
System Administrator     | http://www.iquest.com/
[email-masked]        | interQuest:  "We can hook you up!"

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

From: [email-masked] (Peter Bouthoorn)
Subject: problem accessing floppies with 1.1.52
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 1994 21:05:36 GMT

Hi,

After upgrading from 1.1.51 to 1.1.52 I have problems mounting
(or otherwise accessing, e.g. by mtools) floppies. When I try
to mount /dev/fd0 I get:

mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

Or when trying to read a floppy with mdir I get:

init: open: No such device or address

Has anyone else noticed this problem? Has it been patched yet?

Thanks,
Peter

-- 

    Peter Bouthoorn        |  "We will encourage you to develop the three
[email-masked]   |   great virtues of a programmer: laziness,
  phone  +31 5945 18046    |   impatience, and hubris"
     Linux addict          |                            L. Wall & R.L. Schwarz

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

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End of Linux-Development Digest
******************************