HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Marvellous Memory Munching Make
Date: 4 Oct 1992 21:52:45 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley
Reply-To: torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek)
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.112.15
Keywords: where does it go? what does it do?

In <1992Sep28.165610.22836@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu
(A Wizard of Earth C) quotes me:
> The BSD make has at least one leak: it calls vfork, then malloc,
> then exec.  This malloc affects the parent as well.  It is fixable,
> but not very cleanly (well, you could change the vfork to fork, I
> suppose...).

I did say this, and it is wrong.  This used to happen under the old
VAX/Tahoe/HP300/old-386 VM.  The new VM system does not (currently)
share modifications to the address space under vfork.

>He also went on to say that BSD [make] uses large amounts of memory
>and that the current memory management wasn't very efficient, and that
>a rewrite was on a project list (not his).

In fact, rewrites of both `make' and (at least parts of) the VM system
are `on the list' (separately).  A few years ago, I profiled the new
make and found that it spends gobs of time doing variable lookup.  The
reason is that there may be more than one copy of any given variable
(and in fact for variables like $@, there is one copy per rule), but
they are all on a single list, so the lookup code has to find them all
and decide which is the `right' one.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Lawrence Berkeley Lab CSE/EE (+1 510 486 5427)
Berkeley, CA		Domain:	torek@ee.lbl.gov
From: andrew@airs.com (Andrew Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: free() - not working properly
Date: 30 Sep 92 19:25:25 GMT

johnp@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (John Steve PETROU) writes:

>If a process mallocs and frees memory durings its normal execution, I find
>that ps -axv reports that the VSZ is always growing.

The UNIXes that I am familiar with all work this way.  When you do a
malloc() request for additional memory, sbrk() is called to increase
the size of the heap if it doesn't contain enough free memory to
fulfill the request.  However, when memory is free()d, sbrk() is not
called to shrink the heap size accordingly.  The free()d memory is
made available for other malloc() requests.

I suspect that this is done for two reasons.  First, unless the
free()d block is at the very top of the heap, it would be impossible
to shrink the heap size without defragmenting all the remaining
allocated memory segments.  This would be very expensive CPU-wise at
each free() operation.  Secondly, if the virtual memory system does
run out of physical RAM and pages out a block of now-unused heap
space, it will not get paged back in until it happens to get
malloc()ed for something else.  So I think that the current scheme is
pretty efficient.
-- 
Andrew Evans (andrew@airs.com) - Infinity Development Systems - Waltham, MA
From: hlu@eecs.wsu.edu (H.J. Lu)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: How to format UNIX floppies under 386BSD
Date: 6 Oct 92 23:58:11 GMT
Organization: School of EECS, Washington State University

In article <1asvcfINN7qu@network.ucsd.edu>, brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) writes:
|> alan@ulka.zso.dec.com (F. Alan Jones) writes:
|> >source for isa/ide lower level floppy formatting?  Does there exist
|> >a good reference on the subject?
|> 
|> The manual for the floppy controller chip shows you precisely what
|> you need to do to format a floppy.  If you want to see example code that
|> implements that flowchart, look at the IBM PC Technical Reference
|> Manual in the BIOS listing, or at any of the older CP/M BIOSs.
|> 
|> In short, what you have to do is fill up a buffer or set up a series of
|> loops that will feed the image of a formatted floppy track to the floppy
|> controller chip one byte at a time fast enough.  DMA can help this.
|> 
|> The usual procedure is to write a track, read it back, mark and remember
|> it if it's bad, and then when you're all done writing the disk, go back
|> and fill in the FAT.
|> 
|> Note that this requires pretty heavy I/O access to the floppy controller
|> chip, which isn't buffered in the PC architecture.  Many systems have
|> rather poor multiuser performance whilst they are formatting a floppy.
|> 	- Brian


You may try to port format stuffs from Linux. Linux can format a floppy.


H.J.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: fontenot@ravl.rice.edu (Dwayne Jacques Fontenot)
Subject: best video card for Xfree86
Organization: Rice University
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 20:25:15 GMT

hello,

I have a very simple question: What is the absolute *best* video card
for Xfree86? i.e. what card supports the highest resolution 256 colors
non-interlaced at the highest refresh rate?

I have tried to figure this out myself, but there are just too many variables.
Perhaps there is a list of supported cards somewhere? Along with the
resolution and refresh rate at which they are supported?

thank you for your time,

Dwayne Fontenot

Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: jim@stargate.helios.nd.edu (Jim McCusker)
Subject: Mixing SCSI with other HD controllers...
Organization: OUC, University of Notre Dame
Distribution: comp.unix.bsd
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 18:30:56 GMT

If you are planning on installing 386BSD on a system with two different
HD controllers, BE CAREFUL, and learn from my mistake!  

My system has a 200Meg SCSI (Adaptec 1542B) and a 100Meg ESDI (Ultrastor).
With both controllers installed the system always recognizes the ESDI drive
first and then the SCSI drive.  I wanted to install 386BSD on my SCSI drive
so I took the advice of someone and used SETUP to set Drive 0 as uninstalled.
This caused the SCSI drive to become my drive C:, which I thought was cool,
now just boot the dist.fs floppy and install!   Well the 386BSD floppy
recognized the ESDI drive first and then the SCSI drive second.  I ran the
install program and it wrote the 386BSD onto my ESDI drive!!!  Not what I
wanted to do!  Luckly I'm good at backing up my system so it was just an
inconvience.  

The only way I was able to get the 386BSD installed on my SCSI drive was to
temporarily remove the ESDI controller card and boot the dist.fs floppy,
then run the install program.  Then reinstall the ESDI controller and 
reboot.  

One last question, I tried to restore my SCSI drive to a DOS partition using
MS-DOS 5.0's FDISK and then formatting.  After format completes formating
I am given the message that it could not write the boot area.  How do I 
get around this????

           -- Jim McCusker
From: jlackey@pimacc.pima.edu
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Corruption in BIN01.56?
Date: 4 Oct 92 15:28:00 GMT

>>In article <1992Oct1.155515.12254@fcom.cc.utah.edu>, terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> In article <adam.717861382@marsh> adam@cs.curtin.edu.au (Adam Sawyer) writes:
>>
>>Has anyone else had problems when trying to extract the BIN01.(1-56) 
>>distribution?
..
>>Corruption in BIN01.56
>>
..
 
> This problem is popping up too much.  It seems that the MANIFEST file has
> been corrupted.  This is the file which "install" users to check for
> corruption.  Since you are the fourth person to report a "corrupted"
> bin01.56, I suspect that the site you got the "MANIFEST" file from has a
> corrupted copy.  Please notify them so that they can take corrective action.
> 
.. 
> In any case, there is at least one corrupt "MANIFEST" file out there, in m
> opinion, and archive administrators should check for it.  Since a lot of
> us *know* the agate distribution works,  I would suggest checking against
> that one.
> 
> 
> 					Terry Lambert


Actually Terry, even the distribution at agate is funny.  At the time, I just
attributed my problems to the fact that I had to do this all on a micro-vax 
<bleh!>

When I first ftp'd the binary distribution (from agate!!!) I had
the exact same problems.  (But I had a problem with more then one file...)
I even attempted the same solutions, ie I got the files again, I made sure
I typed 'tenex' (the vax version of binary I guess, can't stand this beast), 
I even tryed 'binary' just to see if that made a difference, and I made sure
kermit was 'set file type binary.'  But I didn't give up there, when I looked
at all the binary files, I noticed that one of the files I was having trouble
with was one byte larger then the rest, and the other file was one byte
smaller.  My fix?  Nothing really, I just _forced_ the size to be what it
"should" be, and it worked just fine.

(As an aside, I have an ide drive so bad sectors shouldn't be a problem for
me.)

It seemed to me that the most obvious source of my problem was the vax I have
to use, perhaps the VAXen multinet ftp software is buggy.  But now, I am not
sure...

As far as I was concerned, getting the files from agate did not help anything.
My suggestion to all who are having problems with this is just to force the
file size to be correct.  That should work.

---
jlackey@pimacc.pima.edu
or sometimes
Josh.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: xlock won't recognize password
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 03:12:30 GMT

In article <1992Sep29.222158.13275@mel.dit.csiro.au> tim@kimba.catt.citri.edu.au (Tim Liddelow) writes:
>Hi all.  I compiled up a X11R5 raw version of xlock from the X contrib
>directory at one of the X mirror sites here.  The problem is that it compiled
>up pretty well fine, but it won't recognize my password.  Now could this be
>anything to do with crypt() I added to the standard C library ?  Or can't
>it handle the shadow password entries (surely that would be built in to 
>the system calls.)

Yes, the problem is crypt().  You need to rebuild passwd, chfn, chpass,
and the lib routines that depend on crypt() (for the most part).  Then
you need to rebuild your password database and reassign passwords.

The problem is that the existing passwords aren't crypted and so the crypted
password from xlock (using the 1st 2 characters of the user's password as
the salt) doesn't match the remainder of the user's password.  This isn't
suprising.

Sorry; I don't have a list of all the executables that use password file
related functions; yet another reason to have shared libraries.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                        "I have an 8 user poetic license" - me
 Get the 386bsd FAQ from agate.berkeley.edu:/pub/386BSD/386bsd-0.1/unofficial
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: julian@tfs.com (Julian Elischer)
Subject: Re: new new scsi release beta2 part 1 of 5 (fixed)SKIP
Organization: TRW Financial Systems
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 00:03:51 GMT

In article <1992Sep28.130134.36@vtrm01.uucp> dcope@vtrm01.uucp writes:
>In article <1992Sep23.221352.16254@tfs.com>, julian@tfs.com (Julian Elischer) writes:
>> This release of the new scsi system has been considerably neatenned up
>> as far as the definitions of scsi arguments go.
>> also supports cdrom.
>> 
>
>  [ a great scsi driver deleted]

thankyou

>
>> Xsh MAKEDEV sd0 sd1 sd2 st0 st1 cd0
>> X
>
>The problem with the supplied MAKEDEV file is it creates a major number of
>(14).  This is also the number of the printer.  Did you ever try to print
>to the tape drive.. does'nt work so well.

Well I might say that the problem is that the lpt driver took my table entry.
If you installed the patch to conf.c, then I guess you'll find the lpt driver
on major number 15 or 16 (depending on which version you've installed)
as MY patch will have inserted the entries for sd,st and cd in
locations 13,14,15 of the cdevsw table.
(so lpt will be device 16), (sorry)

We have two different developers both independently
claiming the "next free slot" in the cdevsw table.
We need to get a central place where the numbers can be assigned.
be warned however, I already have another device driver
(for a scsi tape changer robot mechanism) so The next patch
kit for scsi will push your lpt to location 17.

take a look at i386/i386/conf.c

>
>The tape ,which is a Digital tk50 device, works flawlessly.
>
>I can be reached at (vtrm01!dcope@vela.acs.oakland.edu)
>
>Don.


+----------------------------------+       ______ _  __
|   __--_|\  Julian Elischer       |       \     U \/ / On assignment
|  /       \ julian@tfs.com        +------>x   USA    \ in a very strange
| (   OZ    ) 2118 Milvia st. Berkeley CA. \___   ___ | country !
+- X_.---._/  USA+(510) 704-3137(wk)           \_/   \\            
          v
From: toreh@bootes.sds.no (Tore Haraldsen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: BEWARE:  stupid placement of swap space...
Keywords: (or:  Don't be stupid like me :-)
Date: 30 Sep 92 21:45:07 GMT
Organization: Statens Datasentral A/S, SDS, Norway

I think this handling of the swap partition is quite normal for BSD type
systems. You NEVER put the swap partition first on the disk. The swap
partition is used in a way analog to a raw device...

-- tore
From: jonas@sisu.se (Jonas Lagerblad)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Hardware (cache) problem on 486DX-50.
Date: 6 Oct 92 11:02:04 GMT
Organization: Swedish Institute of Systems Development



I have been running BSD on two different brands of 486-50 boards, and had
some strange problems on both of them, which I have tracked down to 
the external cache memory. They are configured almost identical except
that one of them have 64k external cache and the other 256k. They both have:
    16 Mbyte memory
    Adaptec 1542B SCSI controller
    1 3 1/2" boot floppy
    1.0 Gb Wren7 SCSI disk.

I noticed the problems in two ways, one was that when the computer is
heavy loaded, random programs started to core dump and the other was that
the computers crashed when I was trying to run X386.

The first problem was reproduced by forever recompiling the kernel
(while 1 ; rm *.o ; make; end), this manifested itself most frequently on the
board with 256k cache and very seldom on the 64k cache board. The second
problem appeared with a 98% probability on both boards within 5 minutes after
starting X.

All these problems disappeared when I disabled the external cache.
When examining the cave memory chips I found that they were marked that they
have 20 ns access time (15 ns for the tag ram) on both of the cards.
One of the card manuals stated that this speed should be OK while the other
said that the cache memory should have 15/12 ns access time. At the moment I
assume that this is the problem, and run with only internal cache.

I have filed a complaint at the companies which we have bought the computers
from and I am eagerly waiting for the new memory, since it seems to have a
20% effect on performance to run without cache compared to having a 256K cache.

Has anyone else encountered problems like this, or am I the only one?

Does anyone know how the caches are designed (is it really possible to have 
the same access time on the cache ram as the clock cycle of the CPU?).

Regards 
Jonas Lagerblad
-- 
Jonas Lagerblad
Phone Office: +46-31-830250 Home: +46-31-205955 Car: +46-10-2846031
FAX:	+46-31-831047
email:	jonas@sisu.se
From: brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: How to format UNIX floppies under 386BSD
Date: 28 Sep 1992 13:07:24 -0500
Organization: Kansas State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: maverick.ksu.ksu.edu

In <rcskb.717489070@minyos.xx.rmit.OZ.AU> rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (Kendall Bennett) writes:

>BTW, if I finally get mtools working on 386BSD, it has an mformat command
>to format an MSDOS floppy right? So you could write a shell script that
>would use mformat to low-level format the floppy, then newfs to put a
>file system on it. Or is mformat only a high level format program (like
>the MSDOS 5.0 format without /U?)...

All mformat does is write the MS-DOS filesystem (ha ha) info to track 0.
Stuff like the FAT and the root directory for the disk.  It does not low
level format the disk.  BTW, this is a really quick way to reformat a disk
for MS-DOS that's been used for a tar file or some such.  MS-DOS always
want's to reformat the entire disk in these cases.  mformat will do the
job in about 5-10 seconds.

++Brett;
From: ente@aix01.rz.fht-mannheim.de (Karsten Winkovics)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: multiport serial with 3896bsd
Date: 30 Sep 92 10:48:10 GMT
Organization: Fachhochschule fuer Technik Mannheim
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4

Hi, netpeople.

I'm currently running a small BBS, but I seem to get pi**ed off with DOS..
Thats why I consinder running 386bsd as my new Os for the bbs machine..
 
There is one of a few questions I would like to know before I start the   
installation: 

Who uses multiport serial adapters under 386bsd?
Did this require spcific drivers/kerner modification and if , which?

Rgds

Karsten
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)
Subject: Re: Xfree86 on BSD386: Driver development
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 14:11:05 GMT

In article <1992Oct5.010456.14300@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c162-dz@po.berkeley.edu (wade shen) writes:
>I plan to be running Xfree86 on top of my current 386BSD system,
>but I've got a proprietary video card that isn't supported by this
>release.  Does anybody have any information about how to develop
>a device driver for x
>free86? 
>
>Thanks.
>
Just take a look at the drivers provided on Xfree86.
There is a popular book on VGA/EGA "Porgramming VGA/EGA"
and the authors last name is Ferraro.

Hope this helps,
Amancio


Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
Subject: Re: 386BSD - what a pain to install!
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 21:29:05 GMT

In article <1992Sep27.091749.2076@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> The memory protection on a 286 is rather primitive as well, and it's difficult
> to limit address spaces.

This is only partially true.

> This is generally accomplished (by Xenix, as an
> example) by only running code in medium model, where you have unlimited text
> (read only) pages per program, but only 64K (1 segment) of data (read/write)
> pages.

This is not true.

We've been running Xenix-286 for years with multiple data and multiple code
segments. We're talking applications with megabytes of both.

Of course, I wouldn't recommend segmented memory to anyone for *fun*!
-- 
Peter da Silva                                               `-_-'
Ferranti Intl. Ctls. Corp.                                    'U` 
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012
+1 713 274 5180                                   Har du kramat din varg idag?
From: spel@hippo.ru.ac.za (Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: 386BSD - what a pain to install!
Date: 26 Sep 92 19:11:38 GMT
Article-I.D.: hippo.1992Sep26.191138.10672
Organization: Katatura State Hospital, Windhoek, Namibia

I have an archive controller and a priam et-60 drive which
works on a proprietary ms-dos backup software as Archive FT-60
(and actually is amazingly fast on my 33 mhz 386 :-)-O)

I hav configured it to drq 1 port 0x300 and irq 5. tinybsd
doesn't see it. It also doesn't see my phillips cd-rom, but
this doesn't matter, because I only have ms-dos cd-roms :-)-O

What can I do to make tinybsd see the tape? (Of course the
complete bsd is on the tape ...)

The tape also interferes with the cd-rom which uses irq5.
(Don't tell me to try it without the cd-rom, I ripped the card
and the cd-rom but the tape is still not seen.)


So I might have to sneakernet the stuff of another box but is
there somewhere a note on how to reconfigure the kernel (or
whatever needs to be done) to use irq2, which does not
interfere with anything?

I also have com3 and com4 working well under ms-dos. Is there
a note somewhere on how to install these into the /dev?

regards, el
-- 
Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse    \          /                   (spel@hippo.ru.ac.ZA)
Katatura State Hospital   \        |                            (el@lisse.NA)
Dept of Obstetrics & Gyn   \ *    /                         Private Bag 13215
Windhoek, Namibia           ;____/ (postmaster@uonamib.NA) Postmaster NAmibia
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph Kukulies)
Subject: Re: device 0/0 0/1
Keywords: as0 sd0 boot swap root device
Reply-To: kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de
Organization: I.Physikalisches Institut RWTH-Aachen
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 92 18:21:19 GMT


To add what I have learnt so far:

the 'standard' as (SCSI) driver only detects (attaches) SCSI devices
when they are used. So it was normal that I never saw my DAT tape during startup with the as driver.

Julian Elischer's SCSI driver probes the SCSI bus and attaches all devices during startup time.

Thanks to help from Julian Elischer and Paul Dokas I could track down the problem to the following:

Julian 'forced' me to check if really all patches were installed. I found out
that I was missing the patch of autoconf.c

Paul gave me advice to do a dd if=/dev/sd0b of=file which returned an error 6:
thus making me check the disklabel where I found that the b partition 
was marked unknown. I re-edited disklabel (disklabel -e -r) by hand and changed
that to swap. After that the swap problems (as0b device not configured) were gone. He also told me he was using the line 

root on sd0 swap on sd0 and sd1 and wd0

in his config file which I adapted also.

 

--
--Chris
Christoph P. U. Kukulies
kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de
*** Error code 1
 
Stop.
From: bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org (Christoph Badura)
Subject: Re: BSD/386 and 50Mhz 486
Organization: Guru Systems/Funware Department
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 03:00:29 GMT
Keywords: maximum users, drivers

In <kzin.717851832@cc.gatech.edu> kzin@terminus.gatech.edu (John Rudd) writes:

>Consensus makes an intelligent (coprocessor driven) multi-port board
>that comes with "drivers for Xenix and Unix".  A company called
>Stallion makes a simular board, that says the same thing ("comes with
>drivers for Xenix and Unix).  The Stallion board has a 80186 coprocessor.
>(I'm assuming from other things that I have read, that they meant SysV,
>anyone that can confirm or refute that, I'd really appreciate hearing so)


The do mean SysV.
-- 
				Christoph Badura  ---  bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org

AIX is a better... is a better...  is a better... OpenSystem.
					IBM Rep at GUUG Symposium '92
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: c162-dz@po.berkeley.edu (wade shen)
Subject: Xfree86 on BSD386: Driver development
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 01:04:56 GMT

I plan to be running Xfree86 on top of my current 386BSD system,
but I've got a proprietary video card that isn't supported by this
release.  Does anybody have any information about how to develop
a device driver for x
free86? 

Thanks.

Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
From: tom@smart.bo.open.de (Thomas Neumann)
Subject: Re: No Parity getty.
Organization: News at smart
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 10:24:52 GMT

>>>>> "Joel" == Joel R. Berry <berry@enuxha.eas.asu.edu> writes:

[[ How to configure getty to no-parity...]]
Joel> All of my calling systems are non parity and 8 bit.

Try ":p8:zp:" in your gettytab entry.
--
die "Can't do this!\n" unless perl_is_installed;