Linux-Development-Sys Digest #187, Volume #7 Mon, 13 Sep 99 04:14:05 EDT
Contents:
Re: You can now use Winmodems in Linux!!!!!!! (Johan Kullstam)
help.. 'memcpy_fromfs' unresolved sysmbol when loading module (Karlo Szabo)
Re: Linux standards compliance (Leslie Mikesell)
Re: threads (Leslie Mikesell)
Re: Linux standards compliance (Horst von Brand)
Re: Where can I find the handy SWEEP utility? (Horst von Brand)
Re: development gui's for linux (Chris Gregory)
Re: threads (David Schwartz)
HELP: How / What to start programming ("Simon Kwan")
Re: interrupt times on SMP pentium, linux 2.2.9 ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
DMA and CURRENT->buffer (Mark McDougall)
Re: HELP: How / What to start programming (Tristan Wibberley)
Re: IDE for c++ dev? (Chris Gregory)
Re: help.. 'memcpy_fromfs' unresolved sysmbol when loading module (Mark McDougall)
Re: Flamage - Why? (Stephen Harris)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: You can now use Winmodems in Linux!!!!!!!
From: Johan Kullstam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 12 Sep 1999 19:39:01 -0400
"Joon Nan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> How? Could you please show me. I'm urge to get my modem work.
take one winmodem. open door. place winmodem skinny edge at space
between bottom of door and the floor. give the fat end a kick with
your foot. voil�, a doorstop!
> Regards,
> JNC
> webx1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > shoot me that program please, I would to go on the net with my winmodem!!!
> >
> > thanks a lot!!
> >
> > ------------------ Posted via CNET Linux Help ------------------
> > http://www.searchlinux.com
>
>
--
J o h a n K u l l s t a m
[[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Don't Fear the Penguin!
------------------------------
From: Karlo Szabo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: help.. 'memcpy_fromfs' unresolved sysmbol when loading module
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 10:54:53 +1000
What I'am missing?
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: Linux standards compliance
Date: 12 Sep 1999 20:06:12 -0500
In article <7r7dc8$gv2$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Peter Samuelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>There was a day, and it wasn't so long ago, that Linux needed all the
>device drivers it could get. Coaxing out hardware specs from
>manufacturers under reasonable free-software-use terms was in some
>cases all but impossible.
>
>That day has passed. For better or for worse, Linux now has a solid
>reputation as the choice web-server-grade platform for a lot of
>customers, and any hardware vendor interested in that market is very
>aware of this. They are all scrambling to assure their customers that
>they either support Linux or plan to Real Soon Now.
A web server needs an ethernet card and a scsi card, both of which
are cheap enough to replace if you have a business use for the
machine. The mass market is for machines with hot 3d video, sound,
dvd, and very soon a new generation of USB stuff.
>So I don't think we need to fear the consequences of not supporting
>UDI. Vendors can no longer say "We don't support Linux, go use NT or
>Solaris". Market conditions make this response self-defeating and
>those who don't yet realize this soon will.
I think vendors are correct in ignoring any operating system that
doesn't take itself seriously enough to nail down a device
driver API for them.
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: threads
Date: 12 Sep 1999 20:14:40 -0500
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
David Schwartz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Leslie Mikesell wrote:
>
>> > This is true but irrelevant.
>> >
>> > A model of 'one process per connection' that needs to handle ten
>> >connections will _always_ need ten context switches. A multithreaded
>> >program that does _NOT_ use a model of 'one thread per connection' may
>> >be able to handle ten connections without ever switching threads even
>> >once.
>>
>> How do you do that? Aren't you going to do a context switch into
>> the kernel and back every time you perform I/O?
>
> There is a tremendous difference between a 'read' call that completes
>immediately and a read call that requires putting the current process to
>sleep and then scheduling a new one.
And which happens more often? I don't think I've ever written a program
that wasn't I/O bound. I'll concede that it is possible, but I doubt
if it is common, certainly not if the read() is interacting with
humans.
>> And doesn't
>> the kernel know the 'right' process to run when something is
>> available for it's connection?
>
> Sure, and therefore it has to do a process context switch each time,
>with a pass through the scheduler.
So if we assume we are processing faster than the I/O can happen, it
seems like the right thing to do, since the scheduler is the thing
that knows where the I/O just completed. This seems especially
true if there are many different programs running on the machine.
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Horst von Brand)
Subject: Re: Linux standards compliance
Date: 13 Sep 1999 02:59:36 GMT
On 10 Sep 1999 14:04:39 -0500, Leslie Mikesell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In article <uDlB3.1029$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>Phil Howard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[...]
>>One advantage of volunteers is that they aren't job hopping to get
>>better pay or a better boss.
>And if none of them want to write the thing you need, there is
>no way to encourage them. If there were, we might have an NFS
>that intoperates with others, DVD drivers, full USB support and
>so on.
You could contract it out too, you know... Linux is as much yours as Donald
Becker's, or Alan Cox', or anybody else's.
> As it is, the best you can do is try to put all your
>devices on the other end of an ethernet and try to use the
>network interfaces as the 'standard' device layer to hide
>your netapp, terminal server, X display, etc. instead of waiting
>for native Linux support to match the hardware you can buy.
Don't be ridiculous. What hardware exactly is the one you can't afford and
is the lowest cost Linux-friendly alternative?
>>Mr. Becker is doing an excellent job. And then when you consider
>>just how much he has done ... whew!
>But look through the changelogs if you think everything was right
>the first time. While the hardware vendors may use a less experienced
>software engineer they do generally pay someone to put in some
>time testing before a release. As I recall, the early intel 10/100
>drivers would lock up about daily and there may have been SMP problems
>until fairly recently. (Not to be critical here, but maybe this really
>is more than a one-man job...).
You'd have to compare to the changelogs for equivalent closed development to
make a valid point here. The development of Linux takes place in the open,
driven by its user's public complaints and requests, so you _see_ the bugs
and mistakes and their fixes, whereas with closed development you only see a
"patchset" or "new version" now and then that might (or might not) fix four
favorite peeve; no further clues, no possibility (except for obscene amounts
of money) to even think about influencing the development in any way.
And yes, there are several "not one man jobs" in Linux. And development has
worked fine so far, with teams that might never have seen each other in
person. If not, you would have nothing to complain about here in the first
place ;-)
--
Horst von Brand [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Casilla 9G, Vi�a del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Horst von Brand)
Crossposted-To:
alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.questions,redhat.rpm.general,linux.redhat.rpm
Subject: Re: Where can I find the handy SWEEP utility?
Date: 13 Sep 1999 02:59:41 GMT
On Fri, 10 Sep 1999 11:50:41 +0100,
Paul Hendrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Thu, 09 Sep 1999 17:39:38 +0100, Joey McAlerney
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>While working on Irix boxes over the summer, I got to take advantage of
>>the "sweep" utility. It simply allowed you to gain root access to a
>>machine by simply typing "sweep" (that is, of course, someone else with
>>root access specified that you could do so). I am looking for this
>>utility for Redhat, and couldn't find it so far. If it exists, could
>>you please point me to it?
There are several packages that allow this. If you mean full root access,
there is lowly su(1) ;-) For restricted access (i.e., some commands only for
selected users) there is sudo and a lot of others.
>"linux single" at the lilo prompt IIRC.
Works, but is a bit messy ;-)
--
Horst von Brand [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Casilla 9G, Vi�a del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chris Gregory)
Subject: Re: development gui's for linux
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 03:19:55 GMT
On 11 Sep 1999 20:02:28 -0500,
Peter Samuelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Mmmm, I always use xemacs, gcc, make and gdb. Not perfect by any
>means, but they are of course free for personal use, free for
>noncommercial use, and free for commercial use. xemacs is not an IDE,
>exactly, but it has some aspects of one, i.e. automatic code
>indentation and color syntax highlighting, ability to run the debugger
>and the compiler in sub-windows, symbol cross-referencing.
I've taken a liken to ddd (data display debugger, i think) a gui debugger
that works over the top of your text mode debugger fairly well. I use it
with gdb and it works fine.
--
Chris Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: David Schwartz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: threads
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 20:20:52 -0700
Leslie Mikesell wrote:
> > There is a tremendous difference between a 'read' call that completes
> >immediately and a read call that requires putting the current process to
> >sleep and then scheduling a new one.
>
> And which happens more often? I don't think I've ever written a program
> that wasn't I/O bound. I'll concede that it is possible, but I doubt
> if it is common, certainly not if the read() is interacting with
> humans.
I think we're talking past each other.
In a well-designed server program, you rarely (if ever) call read on a
socket unless you already know that data is available (due to a 'poll'
or 'select'). Blocking reads on sockets are expensive, so why do them
when you can avoid them?
> >> And doesn't
> >> the kernel know the 'right' process to run when something is
> >> available for it's connection?
> >
> > Sure, and therefore it has to do a process context switch each time,
> >with a pass through the scheduler.
>
> So if we assume we are processing faster than the I/O can happen, it
> seems like the right thing to do, since the scheduler is the thing
> that knows where the I/O just completed. This seems especially
> true if there are many different programs running on the machine.
There no excuse for wasing the CPU, whether or not there's plenty of it
to go around. It's senseless to have to switch contexts ten times just
because ten connections have received I/O. It's much nicer to wake one
process which can run in a non-blocking fashion and do all ten I/Os.
It's nicer to all the other processes too since the total CPU used is
less.
DS
------------------------------
From: "Simon Kwan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: HELP: How / What to start programming
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 11:22:13 +0800
Hi Greeting,
I am new to Linix (one week and counting...)
Would appreciate pointer on how and where to start programming under
Linux..
a) to write 'character mode' program. i.e. take input from stdin or keyboard
and send out either on screen or stdout. Presumably in C language.
What Editor, What Compiler and may be degugger to use?
Long time ago, I did programmed in other UNIX and used vi, cc, etc. Is
there an IDE nowadays that is more productive for new programmer (easy to
pick, learn and be reasonably productive with short learning time)?
b) to write Window mode programs (in ways similar to $M Visual Basic). What
window system should I use (X window, KDE, Gnome???) what is the pro and con
for these sevral favours of windows under linux?
TIA and appreciate email reply.
Simon Kwan
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: interrupt times on SMP pentium, linux 2.2.9
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 03:18:24 GMT
Jung Pyo Hong, kk5rg
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The 'short' device driver for linux 2.1 which was published
by Rubini was ported to run on linux 2.2.9.19. It causes the
printer parallel port to interrupt the system.
Using rdtrcll (it returns the real time stamp internal to the
pentium which on my machine is clocking at 2.5 nano seconds)
to obtain the round trip time, from the initiation
of the interrupt to the reciept of the interrupt, on an idle machine
it was about 10 micro seconds.
Again, the conclusion is that linux is useful as a real time
operating systems.
Jung
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
------------------------------
From: Mark McDougall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: DMA and CURRENT->buffer
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 14:42:16 +1000
Hi all,
Didn't get much of a response from my last request so I'll try a
slightly different tack...
I have a block device driver for a PCI bus-mastering card. It emulates a
storage device, ie. you can create a file system on it (this much should
be obvious). At the moment I have it doing DMA directly into
CURRENT->buffer. However...
I have simply assumed (at this stage) that the buffer is locked into
memory and contiguous. ***Is this a valid assumption???***
Secondly, I've set blksize for the device at 2K - it dies when I try to
use 4K. I'm guessing the kernel needs a bit of overhead when packing
block buffers into physical pages and this is why it dies??? Yes/No???
Anyone else used large block sizes???
Lastly, I can't seem to 'persuade' linux to read large chunks of blocks
from my device. I've set readahead to 128 sectors but I'm only seeing
2,4 or 8 blocks typically being requested. Can I force it to request
larger chunks? And are there any assumptions I can make about the
alignment of the blocks? eg. will 4-block chunks *always* be on the
4-block boundary???
In a nutshell, this device realises its full potential with large (64K+)
transfers. Can this be achieved under Linux, or does this just *NOT*
happen? If not, I can be happy with what I've got...
Regards,
--
| Mark McDougall |
| Engineer |
| Virtual Logic Pty Ltd |
| http://www.vl.com.au |
------------------------------
From: Tristan Wibberley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: HELP: How / What to start programming
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 05:05:40 +0100
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This isn't the right newsgroup, but I'll give you some pointers.
Simon Kwan wrote:
>
> Hi Greeting,
> I am new to Linix (one week and counting...)
> Would appreciate pointer on how and where to start programming under
> Linux..
>
> a) to write 'character mode' program. i.e. take input from stdin or keyboard
> and send out either on screen or stdout. Presumably in C language.
> What Editor, What Compiler and may be degugger to use?
Any editor you feel comfortable with, emacs, vi (Vi IMproved), or any
other.
Gcc is the normal one (though cc is available as an alternative command
for using gcc if you are more comfortable with that).
gdb is the standard debugger, there is a very good graphical frontend to
gdb called ddd.
You do character output either to standard out with printf, or to a
terminal with ncurses.
> Long time ago, I did programmed in other UNIX and used vi, cc, etc. Is
> there an IDE nowadays that is more productive for new programmer (easy to
> pick, learn and be reasonably productive with short learning time)?
CodeWarrior is good (I am told), but there is no reason you can't be
productive with the standard tools. An IDE is not particularly useful
(IMHO).
> b) to write Window mode programs (in ways similar to $M Visual Basic). What
> window system should I use (X window, KDE, Gnome???) what is the pro and con
> for these sevral favours of windows under linux?
They all have the same window system (X), KDE and GNOME are add-ons that
provide common functionality - it is easy to write programs that can be
compiled for any by writing alternate front ends. The KDE toolkit can be
used without KDE (QT), and the GNOME toolkit can be used without GNOME
(GTK+).
I'm not going into the pros and cons here. You should ask in a more
appropriate place.
--
Tristan Wibberley
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chris Gregory)
Subject: Re: IDE for c++ dev?
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 03:57:33 GMT
On Thu, 09 Sep 1999 17:34:49 -0600,
Warren Young <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>That brings up something else: many of emacs' features (mainly the ones
>integrating virtually every aspect of Unix within the editor -- dired,
>webbing, news and email reading, eliza... ;-> ) made sense for text
>terminals, but aren't all that helpful when you have a windowing
>system. You used to have to shut down (or background) the editor to
>read email, but today you can just open up another xterm to launch pine.
Jed is a reasonable emacs-ish editor that offers most of the features of
emacs without most of the (ahem) showoffish deadweight. It's still not
quite as good as emacs for many things, but it's superior in a few areas.
Up until the latest version it seemed to crash fairly randomly and I wasn't
using it, but now it seems to be working fine and I've been using it quite a
lot.
--
Chris Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: Mark McDougall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: help.. 'memcpy_fromfs' unresolved sysmbol when loading module
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 16:35:15 +1000
Karlo Szabo wrote:
>
> What I'am missing?
Are you compiling under a 2.2 kernel? You should be #including
<asm/uaccess.h> and using copy_from_user() and copy_to_user() routines
instead.
Regards,
--
| Mark McDougall |
| Engineer |
| Virtual Logic Pty Ltd |
| http://www.vl.com.au |
------------------------------
Crossposted-To: alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.os.misc,comp.unix.advocacy
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Stephen Harris)
Subject: Re: Flamage - Why?
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 16:38:57 GMT
James Andrews ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
: anticipated. We had previously thought that the complexity of certain
: types of software made them "impossible" to implement. Just maybe we're
: still standing on the doorstep to this whole arena of discovery. As
[ snippage ]
Has anybody in this thread actually got a grounding in CS theory? The word
"impossible" actually has a specific meaning there, which has nothing to do
with the complexity of the algorithm. The halting problem is "impossible".
A "difficult" problem such as prime factorisation is not.
[ A quick aside: it's been over 10 years since I studied this formally, so
my usage of words here may be slightly sloppy. Forgive me. ]
Your usage of the term "impossible" above is incorrect. The word better
used would be "impractical". A problem previous impractical may now be
practical due to increased computing power (storage, RAM, MIPS etc etc).
Further, newer optimised algorithms may have been found that reduces the
complexity of the problem, or at least the magnitude!
A problem is only defined as "impossible" if it can be proven that no
algorithm _can_ exist to solve the problem (mathematical proof of a
contradiction is generally the way to demonstrate this). Also note that
these words are further limited in scope by assuming a Turing equivalent
machine; a new architectural design that is not Turing equivalent will
have a different mathematical basis and problems impossible in one system
may turn out to be merely difficult in another.
: P.S Actually, I quite liked my walking on the moon analogy, and best of
: all, its completely true. Although if my grandparents were alive today,
: stubborn as they were, they'd probably still say they didn't believe it
As a statement of how the layman reacts to things... fine. As a valid
analogy to CS theory it's pretty wildly off-target.
--
Stephen Harris
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.spuddy.org/
The truth is the truth, and opinion just opinion. But what is what?
My employer pays to ignore my opinions; you get to do it for free.
* Meeeeow ! Call Spud the Cat on > 01708 442043 < for free Usenet access *
------------------------------
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End of Linux-Development-System Digest
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