Re: VSTa 1.6.5

> >Thanks, that seemed to do work. I get another strange error the first
>time I
> >log in and try to "cd /". It's says:
> >syslog: dos (pid 7) warning: year 1980 is less than 190!
> >But nothing bad seems to happen. The system is still up and running and I
> >can go about my business and it doesn't warn me again, just the first
>time.
>
>Nah, that's OK. It's just a date/time stamp which is before the epoc in
>VSTa's time encoding.

I see. Ok then. :-)

> >This seems like a good opportunity to gain some insight into the design
>of
> >VSTa, so I was wondering, isn't VSTa based on a microkernel? I see that
>the
> >filesystem runs as a user process, but isn't the kernel protected from
>user
> >space servers? If so, why was the dos server able to crash the kernel
>like
> >that? Does the system drop into the debugger as soon as an error occurs
>in a
> >critical process? Just curious.
>
>You're on the right track... when the kernel is compiled with DEBUG, when
>a
>boot server dies it pauses in the kernel debugger. If you had done "q",
>the
>kernel debugger would have returned, and the system would still have been
>"up".

Aaaaaahhhhhh... So the system hadn't really crashed, although it was left in
a somewhat unusable state.

>Of course, without its root filesystem, not much could be done! Or
>if you compile the kernel without DEBUG, then the process would have simply
>exit()'ed (and the system would still have been left without a root
>filesystem).

I see... it all makes sense now thanks. :-)

> >Thanks for the help. :-)
>
>Thanks for giving me the needed information to debug the problem.
>
>Andy

My pleasure. I hope I can help out quite a bit with this project. I've been
hoping to get my hands dirty in something and this gave me a good
opportunity, so I took it. I plan on going through the internals of VSTa and
finding out how it all works. I'll admit that my C skills aren't phenomenal
and haven't even been used in awhile, but I'm getting back into it. I look
forward to being able to do something productive. :-)

I have one more question. I try to run mgr, but bochs quits on me with a
"bochs: panic, *** io read from vga port 3c8" in the bochs.out file. I'm
pretty sure this is a limitation in the bochs vga emulation code, but I
thought I'd ask anyway.

Sincerely,
Sandro
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Received on Sun Nov 26 18:10:47 2000