Which 386 UNIX binaries run on which 386 UNIXs ?

Conor P. Cahill cpcahil at virtech.uucp
Tue Sep 4 22:50:13 AEST 1990


In article <1990Sep4.013116.21214 at fiver> palowoda at fiver (Bob Palowoda) writes:
>  With respect to debugging the corefile. I would assume that developers
>distributing object files for other 386 version of UNIX would do so in
>COFF format and therefor would have the problem with linking and useing
>other 386 debugging tools. Or did I miss the boat somewhere?

This should be true, but it depends upon the manufacturer.

>> vice-versa.  By "reading" I mean using them to link with a program.  This
>> important note does not apply to SCO UNIX, since it has the Xenix compiler
>> and development tools.
>
>  I don't understand why someone would want to do that anyways?

Last year we purchased a copy of the UNIFY/Accell development system for
Interactive Unix.  Unify had done a port to Xenix System V/386 and when
one of the marketers there read the UNIX 3.2 release notes that said something
like "This release includes full compatability with Xenix..." the marketers
decided to release the Xenix product for Interactive Unix.

The problem with this is that the C interface libraries did not work (i.e.
I couldn't compile a C program that used the database).

What I did to get around this was to load our dusty xenix 2.3.2 diskettes
onto a sub-directory of our 386/ix system, chroot to that directory and
compile the database applications.  However, when my code dropped core, 
the xenix debugging utilities couldn't read the interactive core file and the
interactive debugging utilities couldnt read the xenix binaries. So it was
back to the age old (and slow) debugging process of adding printfs through
the code to find where it was breaking.

-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
uunet!virtech!cpcahil                           46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160
                                                Sterling, VA 22170 



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