Arena California Dreamer

[karron at KARRON.MED.NYU.EDU]

Well, actually, a New York dreamer.

>> I am allocating an arena, and each program that uses it checks the value
>> in usgetdata(). If it is zero, then assume that the arena is a virgin,
>> and the first thing that any of the programs do is setup a directory
>> of addresses for data structures inside the arena, and then uscalloc()
>> the data structures.
>>
>> I find that if all of the programs associated with an arena terminate, then
>> the data inside the arena is corrupted, deleted, or somthing, but the
>> value in usgetdata() is untouched.
>>
>> If I do an od of the data, I can see the strings that my programs left
>> behind, but something is wrong from the programs point of view.
>>
>> I would like an arena to preserve its state between programs. Is that
>possible ?
>>
>> An additional note: Is there anyway to identify arenas as special files ?
>> The file commands does not recognize then. I have not tried workspace default
>> sgi rules. Are they tagged ? Since I don't want to delete old arenas,
>is there
>> any way to clean them out if they are not touched for a day or so ? I know
>> that they don't use up disk space, but they do use up more valuable core.
>>
>
>The current design is that if upon a usinit it finds that no program
>is still attached to the arena it clobbers it - alas it doesn;t
>clobber the getinfo/putinfo location.

This strikes me as a design flaw: why corrupt user data, even if it
don't hurt anyone. If you insist of clobbering user data, then at least
leave me a clue at ushdr_info! Right now, I check what is pointed to by
ushdr_info (?=usgetinfo()). If that is null, then exit and remove the arena.
Is the bottom of memory clobbered to null so this is a reliable test ?
I would rather it worked right.

>being able to idnetify them with file(1) is a good idea.

I just tried to do you a favor and make an /etc/magic file entry for
0xdeadbabe (what an number... is that for real ? Someone had to stay
up real late to think of that in hex!). But with the _MAXUSUERS set so
high the offset into the file is 2052 bytes... too deep for find. You
really should put it at byte 0 or 1. You could also reduce the overhead by
making a dynamically allocated table with pointers for a LOT of user procs
in an arena!

>In fact they do use up disk space (as an ls -l) will show.

And they also use up core memory, right ? It would be really nice if you
allowed us to save the share core state as a file too. See my note above.

Is there any reason this can't be done ?

>
>Chris Wagner
>

Thanks for your reply.

dan.
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