Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.sys.transputer
From: u31b3hs@ikki.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt)
Subject: New demo release of Transputer Minix available
Organization: Rechnerbetrieb Informatik - RWTH Aachen
Date: 12 Jul 1994 11:39:30 GMT
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Message-ID: <2vtvdi$efn@urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>

It took a while, but here is the new release.  More free sources,
more commands, less bugs (or they hide better :).

The 1.5 kernel tasks are updated to 1.6.25.  There is still some
debugging support left in, but in general it runs quite stable.  The
first three Minix tasks are compiled using lcc! It are the idle task,
the memory task and the clock task.  Look under /src/kernel for sources
of idle and memory, the bootstrap code and the Minix loader.  The
other modules are provided binary-only for now, which will change as
more compiles using lcc.  For some code only patches against Minix 1.5
will be provided though.  The 1.5 kernel had 320k buffer cache, the
1.6.25 kernel has a lot less.  Surprisingly, this does not really
influence performance, so I guess even with 320k the cache was way too
small.  The clock task gets the time from iserver during booting now,
so Transputer Minix jumped about 24 years forward in time.  :) There
are lots of other changes all over Minix.  I want to emphasize that most
of this work was done by Stuart Menefy, not by me.

lcc, as, ld and all compiler specific stuff got moved into a package
/usr/lcc instead of being spread over the entire fs.  The linker now
supports -l<name> abbreviations for /usr/lcc/lib/lib<name>.a.  A typo in
the assembler is fixed, which prevented using one of the sqrt
instructions.  dis supports Minix a.out format now with option -e.  The
compiler driver has got an option -F, which does the same as with ACK:
Use a temporary file instead of running cpp and the compiler linked by
a pipe.  Useful for people like me who only have a board with 1 MB RAM.
lcc needs a little less memory than before, and should run a little
faster.  Stack checking works now.  A bug in cpp got fixed, which caused
it to refuse certain #if expressions despite them being correct.

Many utilities got updated for 1.6.25, although fsck.minix2 is reported
to have at least one file system corrupted.  make now has "include",
undocumented, like all other make programs.  The library contains
setlocale support.  It is entirely compiled under Minix now, before it
was crosscompiled.  There are new patches for include files and the
library sources, which should be applied to a copy of Minix/PC 1.5
files.  An .emacsrc provides compatibility of origami and fue fold
marks.  A bug which could cause man(1) to dump core is fixed.  Signals
work now.

You can obtain the new release from:

  ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de, pub/linux/transputer/minix/*

If you got it working, it would be nice to get a short email.  That way 
I get an impression how many people are using it or interested in it.  
If you have trouble, please tell me an exact error message if you get 
one. 

Michael  

