More Microport Bugs

[Dominick Samperi]

Here are two bugs that I'm waiting for Microport to fix. Perhaps posting
this information will encourage them to fix the bugs sooner (I've been waiting
for almost two years for a fix for the first bug).

1. If the following C program is compiled using the large memory model
   under System V/286, the system panic/crashes when the program is run
   (if an 80287 is installed, you get away with a core dump):

	main()
	{
		int a[2], j = 0 ;
		a[j] = 1.0 ;
	}

2. When backups are done with cpio -ocvB... > /dev/rdsk/fd, there are
   intermittent floppy driver bugs that occasionally leave files with
   holes punched in them. That is, blocks of data are skipped, or a
   byte is written twice. cpio usually cannot detect the problem because
   the file size is still correct. I was able to find the problem by
   writing my own cpio with a byte-for-byte verify option.

An unrelated comment, for those of you who have not been dealing with
Microport very long, regarding the recent Microport vs. Bell Tech. wars:
When Microport first released their product (about two years ago), they
used a review by Dimitri R. of Bell Tech. in all of their ads, and Bell
Tech. offered "free UNIX System V" with their tape drives. This free
UNIX was Microport's UNIX.

I'm not taking sides, but I did feel that Dimitri was more forthright
than Microport in his comments when he said that they are "publishers
of AT&T software," and as such, you cannot expect a great deal of
support beyond what they can get from AT&T. I do not believe that
Microport provides much more than this either (see the two year old
bug #1 above, for example).
-- 
Dominick Samperi
    samperi at acf8.nyu.edu             uunet!hombre!samperi
    cmcl2!acf8!samperi               rutgers!acf8.nyu.edu!samperi
      (^ ell)