From: drew@hamlet.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: BOOT UP problems Date: 21 Sep 1992 04:21:22 GMT
In article <931@hobby.ukc.ac.uk> djg1@ukc.ac.uk (D.J.Gardner) writes:
>Once in the dim and distant days of 0.95 (or was it 0.96?)
>there was a time when the kernel would reboot at boot time
>following a soft reset, but not a hard... And I seem to remember
>that those who booted via dos also had problems.....
> Those reboots where blamed on a non-zeroed bss. [What IS a bss???]
>Are these reports of rebooting just after the video selection a recurrence?
>I can't remember when it used to happen.
Every 'C' program has four "segments", Text (code), Data (initialized
non auto variables), BSS (Uninitialized data), and Stack. Standard
'C' dicatates that BSS is zero filled. So, if I wrote
int foo;
main () {
assert (foo == 0);
}
I would be fine. foo would be initialized to zero. However,
if I make this assumption, perfectly valid for user programs,
in kernel code, it may break, since foo is uninitialized, and could
be anything from 0 to 0xffffffff.
-- Microsoft is responsible for propogating the evils it calls DOS and Windows, IBM for AIX (appropriately called Aches by those having to administer it), but marketing's sins don't come close to those of legal departments. Boycott AT&T for their absurd anti-BSDI lawsuit.