Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!mmdf
From: HBO043%DJUKFA11.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Christoph van Wuellen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: 68000 minix.
Message-ID: <46396@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 3 Mar 91 14:36:14 GMT
Sender: mmdf@ee.udel.edu
Lines: 13

To answer 'why can't a user read more than 32K at once?'

This is a consequence of using 16-bit ints.
The read system call has to return the number of bytes OR some error info.
Thus, not all values from 0...65535 are legal byte counts.

The most common way is to define the byte count as a SIGNED quantity, and
to reserve the values below 0 for error conditions.

It is a very weak point of MINIX that byte counts are defined to be
unsigned in the library.

C.v.W.