[941] in SIPB_Linux_Development
6.170 problem set support
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 12 15:15:49 1995
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 15:15:33 -0500
To: 6.170-staff@larch.lcs.mit.edu
Cc: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
Hi, I'm doing some work as part of SIPB on doing Linux and NetBSD
installations of PCLU so that students can do some of their work at
home. I've done a NetBSD port of PCLU (an installation of it lives in
/afs/sipb/project/netbsd/lockers/PCLU; I've contacted dcurtis about
making symlinks from /mit/PCLU), and plan to install the Linux port
this week. (Students may prefer to do local Linux installations
because of the flakiness of Linux-AFS, but having it there will be
useful.)
In order for students to do work at home, they also need to have
support materials for problem sets compiled for them (or have the
sources available). For problem set 1, for instance, there was a
library which was only compiled for Decstations.
I would like to help by providing disk space and support for Linux and
NetBSD versions of the problem set support libraries. To do this, I
need two things:
(1) Notification at some time before each problem set is
handed out of what support materials might need to be
compiled and where the source code is.
(2) Symbolic links from the 6.170 locker into disk space
I control. This can be part of the 6.170 locker, or you
can make symbolic links into the SIPB AFS cell:
/mit/6.170/inbsdbin -> /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/netbsd/lockers/6.170/bin
/mit/6.170/inbsdlib -> /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/netbsd/lockers/6.170/lib
/mit/6.170/linuxbin -> /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/linux/lockers/6.170/bin
/mit/6.170/linuxlib -> /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/linux/lockers/6.170/lib
(These target directories don't currently exist; don't worry about
that.)
There will be a number of limitations on how much work people can do
at home. For the problem set on profiling, it might be difficult to
provide good support for non-Decstations (there's no pixie profiler,
so people would have to use gprof, and the Decstation instructions
wouldn't work). Students will of course have to use a Decstation to
support a MIPS binary, since that's what the TAs want for testing.
Finally, while students may ask Linux-specific or NetBSD-specific
questions on linux-help@mit.edu or netbsd-help@mit.edu, we can't
guarantee a high enough level of support for PCLU to call this a
completely supported platform. This is simply to allow students to
try out their programs at home rather than having to go to an Athena
cluster and fight for a Decstation.
I would appreciate hearing back from you soon. Thank you for your
time.
Greg Hudson
Vice Chair
Student Information Processing Board
