lavallee@hawk.ulowell.edu (Warren Lavallee) (10/02/88)
Has anyone successfully gotten an undump to work with TeX and/or LaTeX 2.9? The one that comes with the distribution fails with a "inappropriate ioctl for device" error after a read. Any help is greatly appreciated. - Warren Any comment made above are personal opinions unless otherwise stated. CSNET/INTERNET: lavallee@swan.ulowell.edu (Warren Lavallee) "Each of us is weak and strong. But some of us are true." --PPM
morgan@orion.cf.uci.edu (Tim Morgan) (10/05/88)
In article <9398@swan.ulowell.edu> lavallee@hawk.ulowell.edu (Warren Lavallee) writes: > > Has anyone successfully gotten an undump to work with TeX and/or >LaTeX 2.9? The one that comes with the distribution fails with a >"inappropriate ioctl for device" error after a read. Any help is >greatly appreciated. We have found that with the C version of TeX, it's really unnecessary to build the undumped version, and in fact there are several advantages in NOT doing so. C TeX can read a .fmt file about as fast as the system can page in the data from the large undumped executable, so typically the execution time will be almost the same, or sometimes even faster for the non-undumped version. The disadvantages are the slight delay upon startup and the fact that TeX's banner doesn't say what it is. There are some example execution timings in the README file which accompanies the current distribution of web2c. The advantages of not undumping are that disk space is saved and more sharing is possible. For example, if one person is running plain TeX while another is running LaTeX, in the non-undumped case they will be sharing the same executable of virtex in memory. It also allows you to build a "gargantuan" TeX with a memmax in the 200,000+ range without paying much of a penalty. Those pages of memroy are zero-demand-filled only when the user actually does something complex enough to require them (such as use the PicTeX macros). In the undumped case, on the other hand, each executable of a TeX this size (one for plain TeX, one for LaTeX, etc.) will be over 3MB on disk. There are several different mechanisms that can be used to get commands like "latex", "tex", etc., to execute with the correct format file when not using undump. These options are discussed in the README file, so I won't go into them here. Tim Morgan UC Irvine ICS Dept.