VSTa 1.6.3 available

I'm happy to announce the availability of VSTa 1.6.3 at:

    ftp://ftp.vsta.org/vsta/vsta_163

I got bogged down a bit on the home stretch because I wanted to marry
svgalib to MGR to get the 8-bit higher resolutions (I mostly hack underneath
MGR, and 640x480 is a little cramped). The best step ended up being pulling
the "colorport" SVGA driver from the newer Linux MGR, tearing out the VGA
chip code, wiring in calls to svgalib, and then back-porting this to the
VSTa MGR server.

At the last minute I found that the ATI Rage code in svgalib had a bug; I
had to hunt it down and fix it, and then report it back to the main svgalib
developers. Can you imagine resolving a similar sort of problem while
developing for a Windoze product? (shiver)

Attached is the final feature list for 1.6.3. The most immediate thing to
shoot for in 1.6.4 is LBA support; there's just too many large disks out
there which can't be addressed (reasonably) any other way. I'm also curious
to hear about how well the new FAT-32 code handles your filesystems!

Note that at some point in the near future, we should switch exclusively to
GNU's version of GRUB. I've left that out for the time being. But I've
tested with their versions, and it works OK. If you find problems with
somewhat esoteric boot devices (like USB floppy), you might want to try
GNU's.

Messages may be sent to the list here, or you can query me in private about
anything wonderful or strange in this release. Enjoy!

Andy Valencia
vandys@zendo.com
vandys@vsta.org

>FAT-32 support.
>Fix race condition in parallel threads faulting same vaddr.
>Fix bug in execvp which would sometimes hose the last argument
>M_TIME is gone. RIP.
>Add select() emulation. select() is supported by ka9q/networking,
> MGR terminals, and the console(s).
>Fix bug in grep(1), which used the wrong value of O_RDONLY.
>Fix crash when fork()'ing while another thread is blocked in
> a msg_connect attempt.
>Fix hang when quitting MGR (had to hit a key on the terminal to
> actually let it exit).
>MGR's $HOME/mgr.rc file now works... example in /vsta/guest.
>Port of ctags.
>Cleaned up MGR's "resetwin" command.
>Implemented ephemeral threads to support alarm(), SIGCHLD, ABC, etc.
> See sched_op().
>Implemented ANSI C atexit().
>Low-level VSTa event handler API, handle_event() from <event.h>
>Fix crash when m_to_sm() fails, but a segment cleanup is attempted anyway.
>DOS now maps ".<file>" to "_<file". Renamed sh.profile to _shrc,
> rh.rc to _rhrc, mgr.rc to _mgrrc. _exrc for vim remains the same.
>Re-org of makefile structure; creation of global makefile.all.
>Move a bunch of binary ports to a new vsta/src/bin/ports subdir.
>Create a vsta/src/include, which holds the RCS-managed versions.
> The "make install" phase copies header files to their
> place in vsta/include.
>POSIX signal emulation. This is all the signal set handling stuff
> beyond the basic signal() API (which has existed for a while).
>User and system CPU times of getrusage() are now filled in.
>clock_t and clock() are now supported.
>A <linux.h> has some stuff useful for porting Linux programs.
>testsh wouldn't wait and retry to connect with the console. In some
> scenarios, this would put it in an endless silent tight loop.
>Added a fionread() to <fcntl.h> to provide the ioctl FIONREAD function.
>Ported zmodem rz/sz. Not working exactly right just yet....
>Ported svgalib and jpeg6b. Got some of the svgalib demo apps working.
>Ported PD m4 from FreeBSD.
>Ported the 8-bit color driver from mgr-0.69 into the VSTa MGR port.
> Adapted it to use svgalib. Got high res working with MGR.
>Added BSD's err/warn API's.
>Added true/false/whoami commands.
Received on Sun May 21 21:13:26 2000