Re: VSTa 1.6 available

Hi,

[Andy Valencia writes regarding a grub boot floppy]
>I don't know about that, but I thought the instructions included a way to
>create a boot floppy which pulled the secondary loader as well as the
>menu.lst from the hard disk. You have to keep a couple files on your hard
>disk, but since grub supports most filesystems that doesn't seem like an
>undue hardship. And it spares you having to mess with your current hard
>disk boot mechanism.

Ok, grub boot from floppy works just fine. I pretty much used the second
example in the grub install page.

Next - on to getting 1.6 up and running. There were a few problems
(see below). All-in-all, though, VSTa performed very well. Its
certainly a lot more stable than it used to be.

Here some things that needed fixing and possible fixes:

1) the cam server was not handling message op's w/ the high bit
set. I see that other servers mask m_op w/ MSG_MASK. Unfortunately,
the cam server defines some messages (that it sends to itself) that
use the low 16-bits. So for now, m_op gets AND'ed w/ 0xffff.

2) the ka9q net program would freeze as soon as it executed an
"attach ether eth0 1500" command. It turns out that the function
keep_things_going() will always return true (ie, didstuff) after
the attach is done. This caused one of the threads to continously
loop w/ ka9q_lock held. I modified keep_things_going() to always
return 0. This probably isn't the right way to fix this problem (I
don't know this code very well at all), but it works around the
freeze.

3) it doesn't seem like the /vsta/etc/hosts.net file is being
read by net, so I added a call to xresolve() from resolve() (domain.c).

Mike Larson
Received on Wed Nov 5 16:39:36 1997