info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (10/30/84)
From: Provan@LLL-MFE.ARPA my sources tell me that you cannot control such things as the priority or the IO limits for a print symbiont in the version 4 VMS. since these seem like typical things you'd have to diddle for something driving a foreign IO device, i have a hard time believing it. anyone know if it's true? i can't find any indication of what the limits assigned are. are they just the priority and limits from the job controller? is there anyway to control the job controller's priority and limits? what i really want to do is use the VMS queuing mechanism for the symbionts in a program that's doing lots of unrelated stuff. anyone care to comment on how possible or intellegent this is?
info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (10/30/84)
From: sasaki@harvard.ARPA (Marty Sasaki)
There are two ways that you can write a print symbiont on version 4.
You can either write one from scratch and use the routines provided
for communication with the job controller, or you can modify the
one that comes with the system by giving the symbiont the address
of routines that you want to call. In the second version, you can
substitute routines for starting a job, opening the file, input and
output filters, etc. You should be able to do practically anything.
Marty Sasaki
Havard University Science Center
sasaki@harvard.{arpa,uucp}info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (10/30/84)
From: Provan@LLL-MFE.ARPA from what i'm told, you can do most everything you want EXCEPT control the startup of the symbiont. no matter how you code it, that is still done by the jobcontroller automatically when the queue is started. is it possible for a job to change it's priority and IO limits without breaking into kernal mode or doing anything else that won't be compatible with 4.1 or 4.2 ...? CC: sasaki@harvard.ARPA (Marty Sasaki), Info-vax@sri-kl.arpa
info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (10/30/84)
From: Gail Rubin <grubin@bbn-spca> There will be some new fields per user in the sysuaf file; among them is a field for setting the maximum priority a user can place on a print or batch job. So this priority can be completely separate from process priority. I'm not quite sure if this is what you are asking for. As mentioned by others, there is A LOT of customization features coming along for user-modified and user-written symbionts. I'm in the middle of taking the vms 4.0 update seminar (through Wednesday 10/31) and we just talked about the new batch and print stuff today. -- Gail Rubin, BBN (grubin@bbn-unix)