awa@guug.guug.de (11/18/90)
Dear all,
I want to write about two Minix 68000 items:
- creating archives with gcc-ar
- problems with bash and Hypercache
1) creating archives with gcc-ar
Creating archives seems to be a wide spread problem. As i got recently the
binaries for ftp from atari.archive.umich.edu, i encountered the same
problem. It seems to have two reasons:
o gcc-ar tries to create a temporary file name <libname>_supersede
whenever an operation requirers writing to an archive. As filenames
are limited to 14 chars on Minix, this will probably not work.
o The fcntl.h file seems to supply parameters for open(S), which are
both incompatible with Minix ST 1.1 and Minix ST 1.5.10 (i tried
only with these versions).
I want to suggest the following solution, which seems to work fine:
Step 1:
patch the binary of gcc-ar to use a shorter extension for temporary
filenames. I located the string '_supersede' and inserted a 0 word
after '_s'. Use 'de' to do this.
Step 2:
recompile fs/open.c with the fcntl.h file from the gcc distribution.
Build a new kernel. I propose to copy open.c to a new file, e. g.
gcc-open.c and use a new Makefile also.
No boot with the new kernel and gcc-ar should work. I could rebuild libc32.a
without problems now. I recommend to do so, because the compiled libraries
from the distribution do not work properly ('symbol _iob undefined' ...).
Up to now i did not see any incompatibilities with other Minix programs.
Anyway, you should boot this kernel only for using gcc-ar.
This procedure is not very comfortable, but - all in all - it is a low price
for using gcc.
2) bash and Hypercache
A friend of mine runs Minix ST 1.5.10 in a Mega ST 4 with the Hypercache
16 Mhz extension. When he enters a command name, that bash does not find,
bash dumps core. He is using the same binary that i use on my 8 MHz 260 ST
with 2.5 MB ram without problems (indeed it works fine :-)
As Minix programs should neither modify their own code nor use cpu loops
as timer replacement, i am curious for the reason of this failure.
Has anybody made similar experiences?
Btw, where can i ftp the bash source code?
Comments and suggestions to:
Andreas Awenius
awa@guug.de
Minix is great...