sgerakin@hawk.ulowell.edu (Steve Gerakines) (09/26/90)
I have a few questions for people that are probably more familiar with Unix and Minix than myself. First, I didn't notice until after I tried compiling the MTV ray tracer that the minix ACK compiler had no floating point library. I obtained the port of P.S. Housel's floating point routines for Minix-ST, and wrote my own patches for the "-f" option in "cc". Was the "doscanf" function missing from the original posting? I ended up having to write that, too. Now the system seems to be, well, functional. :-) Are there any better FP alternatives for the ACK compiler? Next, has anyone else installed /dev/mouse and /dev/screen under the 1.5.10 kernel? /dev/screen wasn't too tough, but I ended up having to change the mouse driver quite a bit to get it working right under 1.5.10. Are there any standard patches for those two items? The original postings appeared to have been written to go with the Minix-ST 1.1 kernel. Last, I noticed in the Minix kernel, that when a tty is opened with the O_NONBLOCK mode, the flag gets handled up until it reaches the TTY task, then in tty.c, it doesn't even bother with it. I modified tty.c so that when you try and do a non-blocking read on a tty, if there are no characters available it simply returns a zero count (or, in cooked mode it returns a zero count until end of line is hit). Is this normal for unix systems, or did I just create my own feature? :-) I don't claim to be a Minix expert, but these things that I added really improved my system. If these things don't make stomachs churn, I have a few things that people might be interested in, other than the stuff I mentioned: o A "talk" program that takes advantage of O_NONBLOCK on tty's. It's much faster than a previous version I saw. (The old one looked like slow motion on my system at least.) o A few patches to stvdu.c: added support for the DECAWM (autowrap), and DECTCEM (cursor enable/disable). At least on my kernel, the LINEWRAP define statement in <minix/config.h> doesn't appear to do anything. o Changed /dev/screen so that the hardware address of the screen only gets updated during a vertical blank interrupt. That way, double buffering can be used without any nasty flickering. o A graphics program that lets you define solid-plane objects and rotates them about the x, y, and z axis. I modified a polygon fill routine from the Amiga to compile under minix. I get between 10 to 20 frames per second for various objects on my system. Well, that's enough gabbing for me. I just wanted to see if anyone would be interested in the things I've been doing with my system, since I've put quite a bit of time into improving it lately. Would any of the diffs to the kernel be frowned upon? I'd rather hear opinions now than to post source and get flamed. :-) Thanks, -Steve Gerakines ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Usenet: sgerakin@hawk.ulowell.edu | SteveNet: GENESIS:Steve2 | | UUCP: ...!harvard!swan!sgerakin@hawk | "My kingdom for a smoke!!!" | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------