Re: new tarfile

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis@wins.uva.nl>]

   From: "Weil, Stefan 3732 EPE-24" <Stefan.Weil@de.heidelberg.com>
   Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 11:11:40 +0100 

   Hello,

   here are my experiences with gnu-19991025.tar.gz.

[snip]

   3. Strange things.
   One of my PCs has 128 MB RAM and runs VMWARE with adjustable RAM
   for the virtual machine which runs The Hurd. Hurd boots with 32 MB RAM,
   but not with 48 MB or 64 MB. The boot failed sometimes with 92 MB.
   When it fails, the error message is "bootstrap/default-pager panic: openi
   5000".

Strange.  Roland has made some changes that should provide more
helpful error messages at this stage.  So you might want to upgrade
when Marcus makes new hurd debs available.

   The installations of make_*.deb and cpp_*.deb failed at first with this
   message:
   Setting up ...:
   /dev/fd/6: /dev/fd/6: Computer bought the farm
   dpkg: error processing make (--install):
    subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 126
   A second try (without reboot!) was successful.

The `Computer bought the farm' message indicates that a translator
(probably the translator for /dev/fd in you case) died.  I'm seeing
similar behaviour from time to time with my filesystems (for example
when GDB tries to find sources for the program I'm debugging which
reside on a different partition).  Since it appears to be timing
critical, there is probably some sort of race involved, which makes it
hard to debug, but you could give it a try :-).

   There are still problems in my installation (with ext2fs.static?)
   which occur when I work too long. To reduce them, I do software builds
   (gnumach, hurd, grub) on NFS mounted directories. Nevertheless
   several reboots are needed because make fails after some time with such 
   messages:
   cpp: output pipe has been closed
   mig: fatal: noSubSystem declaration
   bash: pipe error: Protocol family not supported

This indicates that there are still some bugs out there for you to
solve :-).  The most annoying thing is that memory usage still
increases gradually, and bad things happen when memory is getting
scarce.  I've never seen the error messages you show though.  It looks
like your pipes stopped working, so chances are that the server
running on /servers/socket/1 (which should be /hurd/pflocal) got hosed
somehow (or died).  If it's still running you could try using GDB.
You can attach to a running program by using the `attach' command.

   4. Help needed.
   How can I get a (E)IDE CD-ROM device to set up the translator for the ISO
   filesystem? The source code says these devices should be /dev/wcd0,
   /dev/wcd1, ..., but /dev/MAKEDEV refuses to create such device names.

My IDE CD-ROM is /dev/hd2, so you probably want to try one of /dev/hd[0-3].

Mark