Memory Manager bug and A/UX

[Brian Bechtel]

rprohask at orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert Prohaska) writes:

>The latest issue of PC Week contains an article describing
>a bug found in the memory manager of recent macs.  

>Does this discovery have any ramifications for A/UX users?, ie,
>does A/UX use the rom memory manager or does it supply its own?

I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine that A/UX uses the ROM
routines.  A/UX has its own memory management (for instance, it can
address much more than the 16Mb of memory that MacOS can.)

The memory manager bug only affects certain operations with applications
that are trying to allocate more master handle blocks.  I think it
extremely unlikely that this has anything to do with the Finder speed
problem you're seeing.

>Opening directory windows on my iici is occasionally (not always)
>painfully slow and I'm wondering if this might be the cause.

That's probably due to a number of factors.  MacOS file system calls are
emulated by A/UX.  The Finder was designed originally for 400K floppies,
not large hard disks with a large number of files in a directory, so
it's inefficient at caching information about each file in the
directory.  The Finder tends to call the file system profligately, and
on directories with a large number of files, this is slow, even without
file system emulation.

All the above is speculation on my part; I'm a user, not implementor, of
A/UX.

--Brian Bechtel     blob at apple.com     "My opinion, not Apple's"