Theodore Ts'o: "Weekend hacking and other randomness..." (Nov 11, 16:08):
quoted text
> Other comments; maybe I'm doing something stupid, but I can't seem to
> get mtools to want to write a file from Linux land to MS-DOS land.

Urgh. I should never have included the mtools package :-). The problem
is that the root-diskette filled up, and mcopy is just the front-end for
other programs. mwrite, which actually writes to msdos, didn't fit.

The only reason I had even those small mtools programs was so that linux
wouldn't be a closed system in the way the minix demo-disk is. I don't
like the suite very much, but as I didn't think of tar ...

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> Also, trying to compile RCS for Linux apparently tickles a compiler bug
> in gcc.

All bugs are probably of my doing :-( I've hacked the machine
description to add the string instructions, and that's probably the
thing that wen't wrong.

Another problem with gcc-1.40 for linux is that it sometimes can give up
while optimizing. I don't know if it me again, but this time I think
it's the soft-float: gcc runs out of registers when optimizing. It
hasn't happened wery often, but it's very confusing when it does happen.
I hope 2.0 has a corrected soft-float, so that there is no need for
hacking on that too.

Re: file-system corruption: You were right. I think I've found the bug,
and will send out corrected "buffer.c" sometime today. Hopefully that
cures the problem. First kernel patch for this version: not too bad. I
haven't found the floppy driver problem yet, though.

And lastly: Everybody out there making changes to the kernel, please
stand by for the next kernel update... It will probably be in early
december, and I'd suggest you mail me any cdiffs for the kernel before
the end of november, so that I can try to incorporate them into the new
version. 0.11 will not be a major upgrade, just some minor fixes + the
ability to handle other screens than VGA. If things work out with
rename, that might be incorporated :-)

		Linus