UNIX PC BOF Minutes, and Fixdisk 2.0

[Norman Yarvin]

In article <15523 at cs.yale.edu> yarvin-norman at CS.YALE.EDU (Norman Yarvin) writes:
>Configuration: Kermit (don't know version # off hand), Fixdisk 2.0 phone

It identifies itself as: C-Kermit, 4C(058) 19 Mar 86, AT&T System III/System V

>My last comment on 3.51m is that loading device drivers seems to take longer.
>I have not verified this by a stopwatch (I will soon), but after each driver
>is loaded, the system seems to wait for maybe 5 seconds before loading the
>next.

This didn't happen the second time I booted; the speed was normal.  From
this I am willing to make a conjecture about how device drivers are loaded.
Loadable drivers are kept in the directory /etc/lddrv, and have the suffix
".o" (e.g. "wind.o" for the window driver).  The first time they are loaded,
the kernel does a certain amount of work resolving addresses (the 'ld' part
of the program /etc/lddrv/lddrv), then saves the result in a file without
the suffix (e.g. "wind").  This resolving-addresses took the extra time on
the first boot.

I noticed another effect of installing 3.51m: the new kernel took much more
time to load from disk -- about 7 times as many seeks.  Guess it's time to
pull out that disk de-fragmenter...

The new kernel also prints out "Disk Cntrlr = WD1010" on bootup.

Lenny Tropiano writes:
> I probably not the correct person to comment on this, but doesn't X11 have
> quite a bit of networking code in it to handle X windows over a network
> medium.  Since the UNIX pc doesn't have any "great" network, other than
> STARLAN, wouldn't it be wise to remove this from the X server?  Could this
> be done to keep the X applications and server down in size?  I still don't
> know if this will make it feasible for the UNIX pc.  

I don't know.  But if anybody gets the total size of X (server + xterms)
below 1 MB, I will be very surprised.  Many people out there only have 1
MB, and few have more than 2.
--
		Norman Yarvin		yarvin-norman at cs.yale.edu
 "Outside of a dog a book's a man's best friend.  Inside a dog it's too dark
  to read." -- Groucho Marx