seeger@helios.iec.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III) (08/08/89)
Has anyone successfully compiled Magic (from the UCB '86 VLSI Tools) under SunOS-4.0.3 and SunView? I have gotten what appears to be a good compilation on a 3/110C-4, but upon execution it fails to draw any color to its initial window (not even its name-stripe and scrollbars). The cursor and box appear just fine (and the mouse manipulates them OK), and the background color in the window looks OK (i.e. its working in the color bit-planes). After creating and sizing the box, a ":paint red" command causes no painting to the screen, but the program starts chewing up all available cpu resources (with no disk access and no system calls). Typing ":" causes the cpu activity to stop, but it resumes after hitting <CR>. We had Magic running properly on this machine (and a 3/60FC-8) for the past 2 years under 3.3 and 3.5, and we have all the pertinent (I think) fixes from Bob Mayo. It looks like the old SunWindows 2.0 code that Magic is written with has finally been broken by a new release of SunView. The symptoms perfectly match with this description from the SunView 1 Programmer's Guide (p. 483, Appendix C, "Converting SunWindows Programs to SunView"): Signals If you are catching signals, then you should read the documentation on signals in Section 17.2, "Restrictions", in the "Notifier" chapter. There are several that the Notifier now catches on your behalf. You should no longer be catching SIGWINCH signals. If you do, your program may never appear on the screen as it will start catching the signals and redrawing endlessly on the screen, which may not be visible. Fortunately, Sun has provided a way to interface to the SunView Notifier without completely converting the control flow of the program to be notification based. Nonetheless, the port looks like a good 1-4 week project for a novice SunView programmer (e.g. me), depending on how much you want to modernize the program. With a new release of Magic in the works and with everyone (including Sun) moving away from SunView, I don't want to spend a lot of time "improving" and modernizing the code. Another problem with the port is that I have no docs on SunWindows 2.0 (the SunView manual suggests keeping the old manuals, but we never had them). I would like to hear from anyone who has or has not seen this problem with Magic under 4.0.3. Maybe (I hope), there is something very fundamental that is escaping me. I would *love* to hear from anyone who has either solved this problem or is working on it. Any fix that I might generate will be massive and will be unlikely to appear for at least a couple of weeks. Regards, Chuck -- Charles Seeger 216 Larsen Hall +1 904 392 8935 Electrical Engineering University of Florida "Bye, Opus. seeger@iec.ufl.edu Gainesville, FL 32611 It's been fun."