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From: rees@pisa.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: I love my Apollo's (ACL-calls)
Message-ID: <4e708617.1bc5b@pisa.ifs.umich.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 20:10:44 GMT
References: <9012061511.AA04340@richter.mit.edu>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
Lines: 33

In article <9012061511.AA04340@richter.mit.edu>, krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) writes:

  Most of the ACL manager calls are unreleased calls. Use /systest/ssr_util/dmpf
  (the hex file dumper) to look at /com/edacl. You'll see the names of all of
  the global subroutine calls near the end of the listing.

That's a bit clumsy.  I prefer "nm," which will give you just the names of
the system calls made by edacl (or any other program).

  If you can get DBX or
  DDE to display the assembly language for /com/edacl, you may be able to figure
  out the arguments to the calls.

I have a little program I sometimes use for hacking unreleased calls.  You
can get the address of the call with "esa."  Using "nm" on "esa" will tell
you the name of the routine that returns the address of a system call.  Using
this call you can write a program that takes the name of a system call and a
list of arguments, and calls it.  Since system calls almost always have a
status out-arg as the last argument, and status codes are easy to recognize,
it's not hard to find out how many arguments the call takes.  A little guess
work and some experiments and you can usually figure them out.

  Frankly, if HP/Apollo hasn't released the calls,
  it's because they don't want you to use them.

Yes, but they're not just trying to make your life difficult (even though it
may seem that way sometimes).  Every call that gets released has to be
documented and supported, and can never be changed or un-released.

At one time I think there was a book called something like "Programming With
Dangerous Unreleased Calls" (or something like that) that described some,
but not all, of the unreleased calls.  It may have only been available to
OEMs, big customers, or Universities.