ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (10/01/89)
I have had reports from two installations of minor problems with ISIS under SUN OS 4.0.3. As far as I can tell, this is because 4.0.3 has a feature whereby programs running in the background "stop" when they want to do terminal output. This means that if you start the isis system (and hence bin/rexec) up and then put it in the background, the programs run by rexec -- like "twenty" -- may hang if any message has to be printed. They would restart as soon as you move "isis" (and hence its children and their children) back to the foreground. Compounding this is a new loader that seems to flush stdout during startup, guaranteeing that even some programs that do no output at all could hang at startup. Things would presumably be fine if isis was kept in the foreground. Does anyone know a simple fix for this? We don't run 4.0.3 here at Cornell yet, so I have a practical problem testing ISIS under this SUN OS release. Something tells me that there should be a pretty trivial workaround on this one. Please let me know if any other problems turn up. Ken
kean@nyssa.CS.ORST.EDU (Kean Stump) (10/03/89)
One thing that might be the cause is the setting of the tostop option in the
terminal init at login time. From the stty man page, we have:
[-]tostop Stop background jobs that attempt to write to the terminal.
With a `-', allow background jobs to write to the terminal.
Normally the user sets this in his/her .cshrc.
Hope this helps.....kean
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