Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!metro!natmlab.dap.csiro.au!ditsydh.syd.dit.CSIRO.AU!evans
From: evans@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU (Bruce.Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: New version of minix -- anybody taken it for a spin yet ?
Message-ID: <1990Nov5.121909.4367@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU>
Date: 5 Nov 90 12:19:09 GMT
References: <193@rc6.urc.tue.nl> <4643@dogie.macc.wisc.edu> <1932@tuvie>
Distribution: comp
Organization: CSIRO Division of Info Tech, Sydney, Australia
Lines: 41

In article <1932@tuvie> hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer) writes:
>Ps ... also works only for root
>as normal users cannot read /dev/kmem. Setting the suid bit
>solves this problem.

Normal users cannot set the setuid bit for system binaries either :-).
I changed /dev/kmem, not ps.

>The times(2) call always returns zero. The POSIX standard says

It has never "worked" on Minix. My V7 manual doesn't say what it
returns. I have seen it cause a few core dumps from division by zero.

>that way. I will fix this and post the diffs to fs (What the

Implement the ANSI clock() while you are about it. Note that the
kernel sources are a bit confused about clock_t vs time_t.

>Not a necessarily a bug, but a portability problem:
>S_IREAD and S_IWRITE (defined under Minix 1.3, most (all?)
>Unices, MS_DOS, ..., not in POSIX, however) are no longer
>defined in sys/stat.h.
>They should be defined as S_IWUSR and S_IRUSR resp. inside
>a #ifndef _POSIX_SOURCE.

This is definitely not a bug, but it is one of many portability
problems caused by Minix having nearly ANSI/POSIX-conformant 
headers while few programs are written for POSIX. The problems are
a little worse than they need to be since old Unix features such
as S_IREAD are frowned upon. POSIX features are not allowed in ANSI
headers such as <limits.h>, so in practice you always have to
define _POSIX_SOURCE to get them, and #ifndef _POSIX_SOURCE is
not useful.

>Elvis dies every now and then with the message `Alarm clock' and
>leaves the terminal in raw mode. The sequence `stty

This seems to be a common problem. It may only be in the old version
of elvis.
-- 
Bruce Evans		evans@syd.dit.csiro.au