[1315] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Linux Emulation Broken Recently
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ark3@MIT.EDU)
Thu Sep 24 23:17:28 1998
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 23:17:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: ark3@MIT.EDU
To: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
Linux emulation on NetBSD/Athena has mysteriously become somewhat broken
recently. I've noticed the bugs I mention below on a newly installed
machine (machtype -L ==> 8.2.2) and on a stable machine that hasn't been
updated yet (machtype -L ==> 8.2.1). The two bugs appeared at different
times, but each individual bug appeared simultaneously on both machines.
These two facts seem to indicate that Linux emulation development is
going on behind the scenes, indepedent of the NetBSD/Athena release
cycle, yet this development affects all users.
One bug I'd noticed before is that /dev/null actually turned into some
other file (or should I say inode?). Using Linux Netscape, with some
helper app redirecting its output to /dev/null I got the error message
"sh: /dev/null: Permission denied." I could reproduce the same behavior
using the os.system() function on a Linux binary of Python. No, nobody
is trying to execute /dev/null. Doing something like os.system("cat <
/dev/null") produced some clearly non-null output. I did not save that
output because at the time it was consistently reproducible.
Of course, the behavior has changed since then. Now, I get "sh:
/dev/null: Read-only file system" when trying to write to /dev/null, and
apparently null output when reading from it. It's still broken, just not
as badly. I don't know what has changed since then to cause the behavior
to change. This problem does not occur with a NetBSD build of Python, or
any other NetBSD software.
The other annoying bug is that since Wednesday night or something,
localtime() seems to be returning GMT. I discovered this on the simple
clock program I wrote myself. A recompile on NetBSD displays the right
time, but the Linux binary continues to display GMT. This used to work
as late as three days ago.
So what's going on? What's changing behind the scenes? Why am I affected
by this stuff?
- Abhay
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Abhay Saxena Ashdown 312D . __ You can lead a horse
ark3@mit.edu 305 Memorial Drive /|(_ to water, but pastrami
(617)225-9734 Cambridge, MA 02139 (____) sandwiches don't float.
_____________________________________________________________________
