O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T?

[Gary Allen]

In article <55540 at sun.uucp> guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>> To site one instance of something that might be considered "implementation
>> specific" is that SVVS assumes that system calls (those things from chapter
>> 2) really are system calls. Some of the tests invoke "system calls" and then
>> check that the "system time" increased as a result. This implies that not
>> only must a particular subroutine work as specified (totally reasonable), but
>> must also be a system call (arguable), and must have the side effect of
>> incrementing a global variable (questionable).
>
>Umm, to which version of SVVS are you referring?  I found no such tests of
>system time in SVVS3.0.  This is as it should be; neither of the two later
>assumptions are "arguable" or "questionable", they are simply *wrong* - the
>SVVS should make *no* assumptions about what a "system call" is.

[.....some deletions.....]

Ok, so are you saying that I should know what I'm talking about before posting?
If we all did that, most of these newsgroups would go away! Unfortunately, I
posted the anecdotal tale of this instead of obtaining the facts; my apologies.
I checked with the person in the know and here are the facts:

In the file time.c, there are messages to be printed out to the effect that time
(both user and system) are not increasing. On closer inspection of this, those
messages only appear if the time DECREASES.

In the file exec1.c, there are messages indicating that the child process did not
inherit the system and user times of its parent. However, the test actually only
checks to see that the times are NON-ZERO. This appears to have been the sticking
point for Apollo since our system time was always 0. Note that it could have been
any non-zero number and passed this section, I didn't look to see if there were
any other peeks at it.

Thanks for pointing out my error. Apologies for erroneousness[sp?]. I must have
been contaminated by the current administration in Washington.

Gary Allen
Apollo Computer
Chelmsford, MA