Inferno 3rd Edition - 3 October 2001 Update
Release Notes
1. Contents
This set of updates applies to the 18 June 2001 base. The installed software must therefore be that of 18 June 2001, whether installed directly, or the result of updating the original July 2000 release with update packages.
This update offers the following, compared to the June 2001 release.
Repairs and changes
∙ Various minor bug fixes and improvements appear here and there. They include corrected usage messages, status returned to the shell on error, diagnosing failures to load library modules, and use of the %r format to improve diagnostics. Many wm applications adjust their display to suit small screens (eg, on the Compaq iPAQ); currently the applications do some of the work themselves but it will soon be automatic. Other changes are listed below.
∙ Date(1) takes the options -u (show UTC/GMT) and -n (print time as a number). If given a number of seconds as its argument, date takes that as the time to convert.
∙ Format(8) supports tiny partitions.
∙ /appl/env.b uses env(2) to access environment variables.
∙ For packages created after Saturday 8 September 2001, install/create converts the leading 10 to the letter A so that the names of update files remain in sorted order.
∙ install/inst takes a -c option to cause it to carry on even if some files or directories cannot be made or updated. (This option is intended for special applications and should not generally be used when applying system updates.)
∙ install/install takes a -P option that lists the packages to install. The -g option causes install to install all available packages.
∙ The installation software regards files that have had carriage returns inserted before newlines as identical to the original files when deciding when files have been modified locally.
∙ The wm applications now check the whole string received on the window control channel returned by wmlib(2)’s titlebar, not just an initial letter; in particular, they check for exit not just ’e’.
∙ Wm(1) takes the option -s to suppress the start menu.
∙ Keyring-gensk(2) and createsignerkey(8) provide experimental support for the RSA algorithm for signatures instead of the default El-Gamal algorithm; /keyring/rsaalg.c is new.
∙ /keyring/egalg.c uses the correct structure for Public keys.
∙ Listen(1) has a new option -i that takes a shell command for each listener to run to set up appropriate context (eg, name space) before listening for incoming calls.
∙ man(1) allows non-numerics in section names.
∙ /appl/cmd/mkfile now includes /mkfiles/mksubdirs and has acquired the list of cmd subdirectories from /appl/mkfile.
∙ Puttar gives warnings not fatal errors when files or directories cannot be found.
∙ sh-expr(1) implements the != operator.
∙ Tail(1) no longer gives an array bound error when a binary file does not end with a newline.
∙ tiny/sh does not break when filepat(2) is not available.
∙ Webgrab(1) has several repairs to its HTTP protocol implementation, making it work with multi-homed servers.
∙ wm/sendmail no longer fails to save messages when requested(!).
∙ Arg(2) allows re-use by ensuring that its globals are reinitialised by its init function.
∙ Bufio(2) correctly implements relative seek.
∙ Convcs(2) provides several more character sets.
∙ Cs(8) does not complain if it is already running, suppressing a previously confusing diagnostic.
∙ lib/deflate no longer fails on the output of some PC versions of gzip.
∙ Wmlib(2) adapts a little better to different font and screen sizes (though more remains to be done); on small screens, defined as those less than 480 pixels wide, wm(1) puts all windows at the screen origin by default.
Interface changes and extensions
∙ Wm-deb(1) has got a stack button to bring up the stack window if it has previously been dismissed. It also allows breakpoints to be set in modules that have not yet been loaded.
∙ wm/memory’s display has been redesigned to be more informative.
∙ wm/tetris allows the use of a stylus (or mouse) to guide the placement of pieces.
∙ wm/view supports PNG format
∙ wm/view has a new option -i for use in plumbing(6) files, to cause it to listen for messages from the plumber(8). Existing plumbing files that invoke wm/view will typically need to change to add that option for image viewing using the plumber to work as expected.
∙ Newns(2) provides more general option parsing by using arg(2), and does error checking unless the -i option is given to the namespace(6) commands. Its internal mount commandalso accepts the new options -k keyfile to select the source of the authentication key, and -C alg to select the encryption algorithm.
∙ Plumber(8) takes a -v option to cause it to log the contents of messages (for debugging plumbing applications), and also the option -c wmchan to select an alternative window manager channel instead of /chan/wm when the -w option is used.
Tk changes and extensions
Many of the Tk changes enforce rules and do more error-checking than before, but there are several extensions and interface changes as well.
∙ Tk applications must create the parent widget before its children. Currently the check to enforce this rule has been suppressed, but it will be enabled in future.
∙ Widget names are now checked for well-formedness: neither trailing dot nor double dot are allowed.
∙ When text in a text widget is deleted, embedded windows in that text are only deleted if they are descendents of the text widget.
∙ Text widget now redisplays correctly when an embedded window is destroyed.
∙ Text widget now checks for embedded windows in the text that have been destroyed since they were added to the text.
∙ Widgets packed under a destroyed widget that are not descendents of that widget are now removed correctly from the packing hierarchy.
∙ -activebackground now changes the border appropriately, same as -background.
∙ scrollbar now returns currently activated part when activate is called with no arguments.
∙ Only one part of a scrollbar may be active at any one time.
∙ Tk can now distinguish between a null argument {} and a missing argument.
Creating an embedded window in a text widget at index 1.0 no longer causes the packer to go into an infinite loop.
∙ Changing the options on an embedded window in a text widget caused an uninitialised pointer access.
∙ Changing the window associated with an embedded window item in text and canvas widgets previously did not disassociate the old window correctly.
∙ Changing the window associated with an embedded window item in a text widget did not set the widget’s size appropriately.
∙ The -baseline alignment option for embedded windows in text widgets previously did not calculate the line height correctly.
∙ The -relief setting for buttons is now restored after enter/leave or selection.
∙ Buttons 4, 5 and 6 have been added (for the iPAQ).
∙ Tk no longer crashes if the ‘grab’ changes during the processing of a mouse event.
∙ A new event <Destroy> can be bound to a widget to receive notification when it is destroyed (eg, by the destruction of a parent widget). The <Configure> event is propagated to slaves as well as the configured master. These two changes make it easier to implement pseudo-widgets such as dividers(2).
∙ -anchor has been implemented for labels; -justify should be implemented as documented.
∙ Submenus are unmapped correctly.
∙ Tk detects command loops (by limiting recursion depth).
∙ canvas has a new boolean option -buffered that controls whether the whole canvas, or just the visible region, is allocated an off-screen buffer image. It defaults to just the visible area only.
∙ canvas has new operations screenx and screeny to map canvas coordinates to screen coordinates.
New commands and modules
∙ A collection of small and tiny playing card images have been added, in /icons/smallcards and /icons/tinycards.
∙ install/wfind lists the versions of a given file in a set of installation packages.
∙ Touchcal(8) provides touch-screen calibration; it runs both inside and outside the window manager wm(1). Both internal and external interfaces are completely different from previous versions.
∙ Wm-keyboard(1) describes new commands wm/keyboard and wm/pen that provide soft keyboard and single-stroke gesture recognition for touch screen devices.
∙ Gamesrv(4) provides a file system interface for multi-player networked games; gamesrv(2) provides the interface for the game-specific engines loaded on demand by the game server.
∙ utils/awk is a new directory containing the source for a version of awk for use in doing Inferno ports for systems that lack it (or a sufficiently recent version), including Windows. It is not currently made automatically for any system. It is covered by its own licence; see the README and NOTICE files in that directory.
Limbo compiler
∙ The compiler now adds a source file name (relative to the Inferno root) to each Dis file, to allow debug(2) and thus the debugger wm/deb and other commands such as profile(1) and stack(1) to find source and .sbl files without prompting.
∙ The initialisation of large arrays avoids deep recursion, preventing a trap on Nt and a large stack on other platforms.
∙ Overflow is avoided when sorting integers for case statements.
Compilers and architectures
∙ The linker 5l has a critical bug fix in utils/5l/span.c that fixes a bug in the flushing of literal pools.
∙ 5coff has a small change to make the output conform to actual practice not COFF documentation.
Hosted and Native Inferno
∙ Emu has the following fixes and improvements:
∙ Trap handling on Windows now (we hope) does all that is required to work on many versions, variants, updates and releases.
∙ The cursor appears correctly under Windows 2000.
∙ Windows emu passes page up, down scroll, pause, insert, delete and print characters through to /dev/keyboard.
∙ styx.c prevents bad Styx messages from causing trouble.
∙ devenv.c returns file exists if an attempt is made to create an existing name; it implements ORCLOSE.
∙ devroot.c makes directories mode 555 not 777.
∙ For the native kernels only:
∙ Env(3) is now provided for native kernels. To add it to a kernel, change the kernel configuration file as follows:
1. Include the device driver env in the dev section.
2. Include the support file env in the port section.
3. Include the name /env in the root section.
To exclude it from a kernel, include the support file noenv in the port section. You should only do this if you are trying to make a small highly specialised kernel; general applications are likely to make more use of /env now that it is there, eventually to replace sysenv and to select locales.
∙ Common floating-point emulator code has moved from platform-specific directories to /os/port/fpi.c and /os/port/fpimem.c, with corresponding changes to configuration files and mkfiles.
∙ The scheduling code in /os/port/proc.c has changed to support wait-for-interrupt. If no process can be scheduled, the platform-specific function void idlehands(void) is called, with interrupts off (unlike the function of the same name in Plan 9). On most platforms, it currently is an empty function defined by #define in fns.h, and the scheduler effectively spins waiting for an interrupt to make a kernel process ready, but on the iPAQ and a few other platforms it uses the hardware-specific ‘‘wait for interrupt’’ function, for power saving.
∙ A new package ipaq is available that populates /os/ipaq with the preliminary Inferno port to the Compaq iPAQ.
∙ /os/ip has incorporated bug fixes and improvements from Plan 9 to keep the source code up to date:
- /net/ndb has been added, to allow for future changes in IP configuration code
- permissions are checked more carefully; wstat is implemented
- Conv structures are now unlocked on close by devip.c not by each protocol’s implementation; the car lock for connect/announce no longer exists, because the conversation itself is locked
- some missing waserror calls have been added
- ensure local port is unique across existing conversations
- tos can be set for a converstation by a tos control message, and is retained during routing
- qdiscard in qio.c returns the number of bytes discarded
- protocol handlers esp.c, gre.c, icmp.c, ip.c, ipifc.c, ipmux.c, rudp.c and tcp.c have consequentially changed; the TCP/IP implementation most extensively; il.c and udp.c have not yet been realigned with Plan 9
- medium drivers use the structure-member initialisation extension of Plan 9 C, to insulate driver source text from changes in the layout of the Medium structure
∙ The SA1100 UART driver now correctly pushes input up the stack when the FIFO empties.
The remaining points are common to both hosted and native Inferno:
∙ Cons(3) implements the file kprint to capture Inferno console messages; and a file jit that can be used to set the compile-on-the-fly option dynamically or read its current state.
∙ There is a new kernel function:
char* seprint(char *buf, char *ebuf, char *fmt, ...);
which puts a formatted result into buf never writing beyond ebuf-1 (including the trailing null byte). It returns the address of the next available byte in buf.
∙ kfs’s Eexist error has become Eexists to remove a clash with the new Eexist name in error.h
∙ exportfs.c maintains offsets in exported directories correctly.
∙ The undocumented devaudit.c has been removed.
∙ Some Limbo profiler bugs have been fixed.
∙ A race for the use of a shared semaphore has been fixed in devprog.c.
∙ devprog.c has a new debugging event: load filename corresponds to the execution of a Dis load instruction.
∙ devdraw.c implements readpixels from a window
2. Updating the software
You should install the updates as the host operating system user who owns the Inferno files and directories on your system. You might like to take a backup copy of the existing tree, just in case. Do the following to update the installation.
1. Fetch the update archives required, namely inferno.tgz, src.tgz, utils.tgz and any platform-specific packages required for your installation. If you are running Windows, for instance, you will need Nt.tgz; if running Plan 9, you will need Plan9.tgz. These are gzip’d tar files containing files starting with the directory name updates/20011003. Unpack each in your Inferno root directory. For instance, you can unpack inferno.tgz using the Inferno commands:
cd /
gunzip <inferno.tgz | gettar
The following instructions assume they are visible in the Inferno hierarchy. Make sure there is sufficient space in the file system holding that hierarchy. Each archive can be removed after unpacking, and the updates directory can be removed after installation.
2. After unpacking the archives, (re)start the existing Inferno emu; it will be quicker if you use the -c1 option to force compiled mode. It is best to use only the Inferno console; do not start the window system, since the updates will change files in the running system. On the other hand, it is a good idea to make the window in the host operating system a scrolling one, so that you can scroll back to see any errors. All following commands are run in the Inferno environment.
3. Change to the directory containing the updates:
cd /updates/20011003
4. Updated installation software was included in inferno.tgz. You must first unpack that installation software, as follows:
sh ./unpacktools
5. Update the installed Inferno, source and utility source directories using the script applybase:
sh ./applybase
That script updates the inferno, src and utils packages. You might see warnings if you have modified any non-configuration files from the original release.
6. Update one or more platform specific files for your platform(s). The directories are named after the platforms: Solaris for Solaris, Plan9 for Plan 9, Nt for all Windows systems, and so on. For each platform that you run, do:
sh ./applyplat platform
For instance, if you use Windows, run
sh ./applyplat Nt
The iPAQ distribution is installed the same way (it is just another platform):
sh ./applyplat ipaq
which populates /os/ipaq in the Inferno tree.
6. Quit emu. The new version of emu will be called emu.new in the platform-specific directory (eg, Solaris/sparc/bin/emu.new). Rename the old emu file as emu.old, then rename the new emu.new as emu on Plan 9 and Unix systems, or emu.exe on Windows. When run, it should announce itself as ‘‘Inferno Third Edition (3 October 2001)’’.