Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.sys.transputer
From: u31b3hs@ikki.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt)
Subject: New demo release of Transputer Minix
Organization: Rechnerbetrieb Informatik - RWTH Aachen
Date: 5 Sep 1994 15:46:44 GMT
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Message-ID: <34feh4$a5s@urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>

I'm a little late, but here it is: A new version.  Mainly bugfixes and
some more features, but nothing new really apart from offering a lot
more free RAM.

Bugfixes:

-  memmove() no longer calls memcpy(), assuming it would be safe! Instead
   memmove contains the safe code.  Whoever wrote the original code should
   just hide ;)
-  brksize will be initialised with an aligned value now.  Otherwise weird 
   things may happen, the worst being most everything working normal.
-  cpp has a couple bugfixes which make assert() work.
-  I started cleaning up the include files by using hidden types.
-  make is changed to know about CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
-  more fine tuning of stack sizes
-  a global configuration file for compiler dependent things

New features:

setlocale() is rewritten, and catalog support for LC_CTYPE and LC_TIME
is added.  Support for ISO-8859-1 is prepared, it only needs someone to
find out which character has which attributes and change ansi/ctype.c
accordingly.  A hacked strftime() originally written by Peter Holzer is
included, which supports C, de, es, it, fr, fi, se, no and nl locales
in ISO-8859-1 character set.  Time zone support is added, but not too
well tested yet.  login now finally compiles without hacks.  The
Makefiles are better now, all controlled by one central Configfile. 
difftime() is in a seperate file.  The library building process has
been changed some to allow for easier replacement of portable C
functions by faster assembler versions without influencing other
architectures.  The library contains transparent shadow password
support, that means recompiling programs is enough and they will use
shadow passwords.  Since it is so messy, K&R is no longer supported. 
Not that it was before, every other function used ANSI already, but now
everything will be ANSIfied.  The "short-utils" finally compile without
tweaking.  lcc now uses tricks like mint; ldnlp 2 instead of ldc
0x80000008.  Although this does not change much for the average ldc
case, it can significantly improve the worst case.  lcc now compiles fp
constants right, because the library now contains a real strtod()
function, not just a dummy.

The clock task is available as source now.  I didn't include it last
time because PH sources were still used, and I was too lazy to make a
diff.  Now it is rewritten and a lot more readable.  hostfs is there as
source now, too.  It just compiled with lcc as well.  init and MM are
compiled using lcc, but not available as source or diff yet.  All in
all, you have 800KB free RAM on a 1MB board now.  Now all utilities
needed to build a new kernel image are there.

You can obtain the new release from:

  cantor.informatik.rwth-aachen.de, pub/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.  *.gz files are GNU zipped files.

Michael  

