There’s a new 2.19.3 update for bsdgames-osx this holiday season. The previous update that fixed mille compilation errors with more recent versions of clang accidentally clobbered a variable that was supposed to be a bool that was really a tristate variable. Ooops. An astute commenter brought the issue to my attention, and last night I finally got around to fixing it. Now you can happily play mille to your heart’s content (and it’s surprisingly fun).
The modern-xiafs module, a delightfully useless thing that allows modern Linux kernels to mount and use the ancient xiafs filesystem, has been updated to work with Linux 3.12.1. This was the smallest update yet (one function in inlude/linux/mm.h had been changed). Nothing else of note is in this update, and previous warnings not to use it in production (which would be pretty stupid, seeing as it has those max 2GB volume/64MB file size limitations) and that it could conceivably set your computer on fire or run off with your cookware/checkbook/long term companion remain in effect.
If you’ve upgraded your Mac to Maverics and tried to build bsdgames-osx, you probably found that the compiler compains bitterly about redefinition of typedef ‘va_list’ is a C11 feature and bombs out horribly. The bug in question is in the system headers, too, so fixing the code is obviously out of my hands. There’s an easy fix, though. Add CFLAGS=“-std=c11” when running bsdmake to build the games, and it compiles fine.
I took a break from sending Kerbals across the solar system to update modern-xiafs to work with the 3.11.1 Linux kernel. This, I’m happy to say, was a small and quick update; the only changes needed were to xiafs_readdir because they went and changed the directory operations in the kernel subtly for some reason. There isn’t anything of note here otherwise. Xiafs seems to work as expected with no currently known gotchas.
Courtesy of kognate over on github, we have a 2.19.1 minor point release of bsdgames-osx. It seems that something changed between the version of clang I have installed and the one he has installed, so he added stdbool.h to mille and made a few other changes to get it to compile. These changes get it compiling happily with Apple LLVM version 5.0. You can see more on the pull request’s discussion.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm TeleVue eyepieces, OIII filter, Paracorr. New objects observed: NGC 7008, NGC 7129, NGC 7160, NGC 7788, NGC 7790, Frolov 1 Previously viewed objects: NGC 6826 (Blinking Planetary Nebula), NGC 6939 There were two reasonably clear nights in a row. That doesn’t happen real often. I spent some time looking for Herschel 400 galaxies, but sadly right now there don’t seem to be a whole lot of them out.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm TeleVue, 6mm eyepieces, 2x Barlow, OIII filter, Paracorr. New objects observed: NGC 6755, NGC 6781, NGC 752, NGC 1245 Previously viewed objects: Messier 31, Messier 32, NGC 7009 I got a good night for observing for the first time in nearly two months. Ugh. I was mostly pursuing Herschel 400 objects this night, but did spend some time observing the Andromeda Galaxy for a while. It looked pretty good, especially for being in the city - not only was the nucleus nice and bright, but there were hints of the rest of the galaxy around it, even the barest hints of the dust lanes.
I am pleased to announce the release of version 2.19.0 of bsdgames-osx. This release adds ching and wtf to the package. Both taken from the NetBSD sources, ching is the venerable I Ching generator from back in the Version 7 days that was long encumbered by AT&T copyrights. The C program itself was rewritten for 4.4BSD and had no AT&T code, but the data file was encumbered until Caldera open sourced the Ancient Unixes a while back.
This is pretty nice. I’m happy to say that the bug mentioned in the previous post, where deleting a bunch of entries from a directory, then copying new ones in, would cause fsck to complain about bad directories and some inodes and zones to be “free, but marked in use” has been fixed. It was an interesting problem. To simplify the xiafs port, I had hollowed out the minixfs code to build on because xiafs was originally an extension of the Minix filesystem, but not everything carried straight over between the two filesystems.
There’s some good news and some bad news on the xiafs front. The good news is that the module loads into the kernel and mounts/unmounts xiafs filesystems just fine with the latest (as of this writing) Linux kernel, 3.10.1. The bad news is that I uncovered another bug (that I’m pretty sure is in the directory code) that affects at least the 3.10.1 and 3.2.0 versions, and probably the 2.6.32 one as well, where if you copy a bunch of files into a directory, delete them, and then copy a bunch more files into the directory, fsck will consider some but not all of the inodes and data zones to be “free, but marked in use”.