soper@maxzilla.encore.com (Pete Soper) (02/10/90)
From article <763@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au>, by francis@chook.ua.oz (Francis Vaughan): > We have had a lot of trouble with processes hanging around, or not > correctly dieing. A lot of the new students (or worse those that had been > using VMS before) would type control-Z to stop compilations and other > things (Remember ^Z is EOF on VMS). They would then just hit break on the > annex line and think they were logged out. A kill command on the annex (or > a timeout) would send SIGHUP to all the processes. Instead of quietly dieing > we found some (in particular programs written in Pascal) would go nuts. > They would go into an infinite loop and start to allocate lots of memory. > Eventually we were forced to write a deamon to kill these off. The best > explanation we could thing of was that the signal handler under UMAX was > broken. We know it is one part that Encore had rewritten. > A lot of this has calmed down now, but this may be because we have better > behaved students, rather than Encore having fixed the problems. In May of 1988 I got a list of 11 C and Pascal compiler problems from your site sent by Jeremy Webber. One problem (nonlocal control variables disallowed) was a conflict between the ISO standard and BSD Pascal extensions and a fact of life that could not be changed. Seven problems were either already corrected or were corrected within a few days of getting the list. Two other problems were fixed in the week subsequent to my reply to Jeremy in a letter dated June 9, 1988, asking for further information about the last problem, which is the one about SIGHUP and Pascal programs which you described above. I could not reproduce this then and still cannot now. I had Customer Service send my reply to Jeremy via FAX in care of your distributor DISC since the problem list came this way and both DISC and Customer Service could make use of the information. My letter detailed the exact status of every item as well as the schedule of compiler releases that would address them. I also included my email address and indicated the desire to establish email paths to your site so I could get feedback about any further Pascal compiler problems as fast as possible. This was before I got word about the rules DISC had established with Encore forbidding direct communication with DISC customers. I never heard back from Jeremy about the hangup problem. If it is still present, please send more details. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Pete Soper +1 919 481 3730 internet: soper@encore.com uucp: {bu-cs,decvax,gould}!encore!soper Encore Computer Corp, 901 Kildaire Farm Rd, bldg D, Cary, NC 27511 USA