Re: Mint Technical Questions.........

[Howard Chu <howard@harry.lloyd.com>]

  Ok.  I might have missed this somewhere but I have several
  semi-technical questions.  They get more complex the higher
  the number.

Generally this sort of question should have gone to the main list,
mint-request is the administrative address.
  
  Question #1
  -----------
  Ok.  People have told me that Mint has a blocking-fork() or something
  and that causes problems with using pipes etc.  Namely it causes me
  major problems when dealing with GNU configure scripts.  
  
  What are the ramifications of modifying pipefs.c and changing the 
  pipesize from 4096 to say 4*4096 or maybe 8*4096?
  
  If this is not a good idea, is there a way to avoid this blocking
  problem?  I primarily only care about GNU configure scripts.

The blocking fork is not an issue when the child process immediately
follows with an exec. Once the exec occurs, the parent is unblocked.
This is the standard operation that occurs when a shell spawns a process,
so the blocking fork is irrelevant there. What version of MiNT are you
running? If you are having problems with pipeline processes getting
blocked, more likely you're running into a bug in job-control handling.
  
  Question #2
  -----------
  I have examined dld-3.2.3 from prep.ai.mit.edu and it includes
  support for the atarist.  I built it.  But if I try to compile the
  tests using gcc -fpic it fails at the link stage complaining that
  _GLOBAL_OFFSET (sp?) is not defined.  Does anyone understand this?
  Is this a problem with dld or gcc or mint or what?

The dld port was done quite a long time ago for plain TOS, not MiNT.
I don't believe anyone has been keeping the Atari support up to date.
  
  Alternatively if -fpic is not what should be used (maybe -mpcrel
  or -mbaserel) how can I get this to work.  Dynamic linking is
  something that would be VERY advantageous, especially for perl5
  and python etc.
  
Yes, dynamic linking would be nice. More work needs to be done, whether with
dld or some other tools, to get it going in MiNT.
  
  Question #3
  -----------
  I have found a few examples of code that works when compiled without
  the -O but doesnt work with it (GNU grep 2.0).
  
  Are these cases of bad code generation from gcc?  Or is this some
  kind of problem with the stack allocation variable (printstk/fixstk)?

If the -O flag alters the program behavior, it is by definition a compiler
bug. You didn't specify which version of the compiler you're using.
  
  
  Question #4
  -----------
  Anyone want to help me work on porting the most recent version of the
  GNU binutils 2.5.1 to macmint.  Ive got libiberty, libbfd, & gas working.
  I still need to get ld, and the binutils stuff (nm,size,ar,ranlib) working.
  I suspect that getting ld and ar working will be the most difficult.
  
If you have the bfd library working already then ld should be trivial. 
What's the problem?
  -- Howard