[comp.sys.atari.st] Large executables

jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (John R. Dunning) (09/07/88)

Last night I booted my ST WITHOUT Turbodos for the first time in many
months.  (The reasons are interesting, but not relevant here) When I
tried to run an experimental GCC that I'm working on, it died with wierd
errors.  A bit of investigation revealed that when trying to start the
executable for compiler pass 1, the image loads, then dies immediately
with error code -66; bad executable format.

I rebooted with Turbodos enabled, and it worked!

I poked around some, but couldn't come up with any plausible reason for
this behaviour.  The executable was produced with the same linker I've
been using for a while, with no ill effects.  The only thing that seems
at all funny about it is that it's enormous (395K).  

Has anyone ever seen anything like this?  The fact that Turbodos fixes
it suggests that it might be a known bug (after all, it fixes the bugs
in slow memory clearing, slow FAT scanning... :-} ); perhaps it's fixed
in new ROMs or something?  I'm still running the 11/20/85 jobs.

Any and all information will be appreciated.

gert@uva.UUCP (Gert Poletiek) (09/08/88)

In article <19880907153917.7.JRD@MOA.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (John R. Dunning) writes:
>Last night I booted my ST WITHOUT Turbodos for the first time in many
>months.  (The reasons are interesting, but not relevant here) When I
>tried to run an experimental GCC that I'm working on, it died with wierd
>errors.  A bit of investigation revealed that when trying to start the
>executable for compiler pass 1, the image loads, then dies immediately
>with error code -66; bad executable format.
>
>I rebooted with Turbodos enabled, and it worked!

Yes this  is a known bug: gcc is so big that the relocation table is larger
than 32KByte. Old ROMS cannot handle this, JAMDOS and TURBODOS can.
So can the new Beta 1.4 ROMS (in RAM).



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gert Poletiek  Dept. of Math. and Computing Science, University of Amsterdam,
               Kruislaan 409, NL-1098 SJ  Amsterdam, The Netherlands
UUCP:          {decvax,cernvax,unido,seismo}!mcvax!uva!gert
bitnet:        uva!gert@mcvax.bitnet, U00025@hasara5.bitnet

Opinions (if any) are my own.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gert Poletiek  Dept. of Math. and Computing Science, University of Amsterdam,
               Kruislaan 409, NL-1098 SJ  Amsterdam, The Netherlands
UUCP:          {decvax,cernvax,unido,seismo}!mcvax!uva!gert
bitnet:        uva!gert@mcvax.bitnet, U00025@hasara5.bitnet

Opinions (if any) are my own.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) (09/09/88)

In article <19880907153917.7.JRD@MOA.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (John R. Dunning) writes:
> Last night I booted my ST WITHOUT Turbodos for the first time in many
> months. ... The only thing that seems
> at all funny about it is that it's enormous (395K).  

This is a known bug: if a program file has more than 32 kilobytes of
fixups, Pexec dies horribly.  It's fixed.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt