Minixfs + DLL libs

[evanlang@uss.lonestar.org (Evan Langlois)]

Hello all!

After so many people mentioned fsck -e I decided to try it again and
see what happened.  Well, this time it worked, and it said the size
was 21484K and the expected was 22838K !   So its no wonder the
system stopped writing information.

I checked my partition table (I only have C + D) and there was an E!
It started about 3MB after D, and didn't go all the way to the end of
the drive!   Well, I started formatting HD floppies to back up, but I
didn't have a back-up program for MiNT, other than an old and buggy tar.
So, I downloaded a new tar, figured out that it didn't send to stdout 
by default and I had to use -f (took awhile to figure that out).

The rest of the backup took about 30 minutes.  It was under 2 minutes a
disk.  I was really surprised at how easy it went.   Well, after all that
I shoved a shell, minit, tar, and a few others on my FAT drive drive,
zero'd the Minix partion, then fixed the partition table and re-zero'd it
for good measure.  Then I rebooted and re-installed everything (using -e
with minit just in case).  Even after writing 18 MB to the drive I
still have no more problems.  It works great again!  I wish I knew how the
partition table got messed up :-(   And I found a 2MB btmp file that I
deleted - I have about 6 or 7 MB free now (more than I've had free in quite
awhile.

Now, on to the good stuff.  I'll be posting my specifications for a DLL
system soon so the MiNT folks can check it over and see if there are any
gross errors in some of the things it does with Pexec() and its assumptions
on memory.  And what happens when a tfork()'d process calls malloc()?
If malloc() calls Malloc(), then the memory is allocated by the child.
So, won't this cause a problem if the child exits and the parent has
tried using some of the memory (since it gets stuck in with the rest of the
parent's memory in the malloc() pool) ?    How does this work, or fail?
Not to mention that if parent and child call malloc at the same time there
will fireworks :-) 

CYA,
Evan Langlois