Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!wuarchive!rex!ames!dftsrv!mimsy!nmrdc1!rdc30med
From: rdc30med@nmrdc1.nmrdc.nnmc.navy.mil (LCDR Michael E. Dobson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: extension to Bruce"s 386 kernel and MINIX
Summary: It isn't as hard as Stuart suggests
Message-ID: <1990Oct9.123549.3317@nmrdc1.nmrdc.nnmc.navy.mil>
Date: 9 Oct 90 12:35:49 GMT
References: <32696@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Organization: Naval Medical Research & Development Command
Lines: 48

In article <32696@nigel.ee.udel.edu> cracraft@ai.mit.edu writes:
>
>I've had a bad experience with the 386 kernel and associated
>utilities (cppmake, db). cppmake simply would not build. Under
>__STDC__ #ifdef's the inclusion of <varargs.h> wasn't supported
>by Minix 1.5. Commenting that out resulted in numerous
>other errors such as "wait_t" as an undefined typedef and

Uhhmm, did you try grep'ing /usr/include to find where they were defined?
That's a trick anyone porting or installing software should know.

>The entire 386 kernel installation notes ran a total of
>a page or two and really lacked depth. 

Are you sure?  I have almost a dozen or so pages of various notes, READMEs,
bugs, etc.  Taken together, they provide quite a bit of information.

[ more whinning deleted]

>To repeat: installation of Evans' 386 kernel with Chew's cppmake
>failed miserably on a Minix 1.5 (IBM PC AT clone). It was very
>disappointing.
>
Well it worked very well for me.  I never did get ccpmake to work, but it wasn't
very hard to create different flavors of makefiles for ACK, bcc-16 and bcc-32.
The library installation was a breeze thanks to the EXCELLENT documentation
and the makelib scripts.  I was able to build a 32-bit system on a '286 as 
well as on a '386 with only 2 Meg of RAM.  I installed not only the current
mnx386_1.1, but Bruce's first version that was "released".  As other respondents
have mentioned, Bruce was very responsive to e-mail requests when I got stuck 
(due almost always to my own stupidity).

I would like to point out that I am not a CS sutdent, nor a software engineer.
I can barely read a C program and still haven't figured out how to change 
passing a struct to a function to passing a pointer to the struct into the 
function, but I found adding the 386 changes to the kernel far easier that
any of the upgrades (I started with 1.1).

So in summary, contrary to Stuart's experience, it isn't that hard to build
Minix-386 with the tools Bruce has so graciously provided with more than a 
little help from Earl.  However, if you had trouble with the upgrades, then
perhaps you aren't ready to tackle this project.

-- 
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