[2307] in Release_Engineering
7.0: Beware!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Basch)
Wed May 9 09:47:11 1990
Date: Wed, 9 May 90 09:44:46 -0400
To: testers-announce@MIT.EDU, staff@MIT.EDU
From: Richard Basch <probe@MIT.EDU>
The following are items that may adversely affect you in the Athena 7.0
release (coming soon):
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*** If you get mail notification and have who the message was ***
*** from and subject displayed (using zmailnotify), comment out ***
*** the that runs zmailnotify in your .zwgc.desc ***
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There is a new version of AFS in the 7.0 release. Because of bugs with
old servers (such as is running on the Athena AFS cell), attempts to
open files with exclusive locks will cause the client to think the
server has just crashed. Does this affect you -- maybe... If you use
"zmailnotify" to display mail message headers (such as who the mail is
from and the subject of the message), this will cause your client to
think one of the AFS servers has just crashed. Two minutes later, the
client will see the server come back, but the next invocation of
"zmailnotify" will cause your client to think the server has crashed
again. The software on the Athena AFS cell is expected to be
upgraded by the final release (June 20th), but you will encounter
problems during the early testing period.
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*** 7.0 RT binaries are incompatible with 6.4 (and prior) systems ***
*** If you develop software, those items compiled on RT's running ***
*** 7.0 might not work on machines in the field running 6.4. ***
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If you are developing software, please note that the syscall table has
changed in several respects on the RT. Almost all 6.4 binaries will run
on 7.0 (only those that use mount() or afs_call() will have problems).
However, the reverse is not true -- 7.0 binaries will not necessarily
run on 6.4! The default calls in 7.0 are IBM's standards for their AOS
release -- 6.4 did not use these standards, but to maintain some
semblance of compatibility, the 6.4 calls still exist in the 7.0 kernel.
-Richard
