Use of select in NeWS.

[David Robinson]

In article <7171 at agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, chapman at eris (Brent Chapman) writes:
> In article <20164 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
> #
> #>Perhaps they weren't _that_ concerned with portability, or else they
> #>wanted to make sure than NeWS ran better on their hardware than on
> #>anything else (so everyone buys their hardware to get the best
> #>version..).
> 
> #Yeah Bill, great plot heh! It would probably take 10 or 15 minutes to
> #track down the select() bug thereby crushing the competition by
> #forcing a late release...And I suppose Athena puts all those NULL
> #pointer bugs into X-windows as a plot to force people to buy Vaxes!
> #
> #C'mon, I can't believe you said this, do you really believe this is
> #true?
> 
> Well, Sun _does_ have two different versions of NeWS, according to the
> instructors from Sun at the NeWS tutorial at the Phoenix USENIX last
> summer.  There's the fast, tuned, Sun-only version that is what Sun
> distributes binaries from, then there is the slower, portable version
> that they will sell source for to other vendors.

Huh? I think you are a bit off here.

Looking in our NeWS 1.0 source directory we have a REF directory and
a SUN directory.  The SUN directory contains the EXACT source that
Sun generates the binaries from.  The REF directory contains the
"portable" reference code that makes initial ports easier.  For Example,
if you have a device that you can memory map it has the routines that
does all the screen operations into memory.  It is slow of course but
allows you to quickly get a port going.  The Sun code is highly tuned
for the Sun pixrect libraries and in the REF directory they provide a
method to emulate pixrects on other machines.  

If your were to seriously port NeWS to a completely new display
device you would probably start with the REF code and improve on it
using the example of Sun's native port.

I doubt if Sun is out to force all other NeWS servers to be slow!
If you have a "smart" display device with a built in CPU,
the Masscomp "Aurora" comes to mind, you could built a much faster
NeWS server than Sun could with their "dumb" displays.





-- 
	David Robinson		elroy!david at csvax.caltech.edu     ARPA
				david at elroy.jpl.nasa.gov	  ARPA
				{cit-vax,ames}!elroy!david	  UUCP
Disclaimer: No one listens to me anyway!