I was throwing dosbox out as a quick example, but wow looks like quite the fun little fork you have over there!

So lucky to have it prevent the fork… I used to use it religiously,. But it was only for stuff like syslog, tftp and other network crap (SNMP tools). And it was me just being too much of a wimp to just not port BSD syslog and friends directly to Windows.

I’ve had catastrophic blowups with cdrtools and super old GCC / DJGPP cross tools. It really wasn’t until I did the x68000 GCC re-port, along with the Linux kernel that it’s obvious in retrospect that GCC is the 3 key programs and the one that forks and breaks stuff is the driver, gcc.c so the obvious fix is to use the DOS port version of GCC as it doesn’t fork and runs the other programs one at a time. The other two, cccp and cc1 just parse text files. There is less than no magic there. The rest of the chain is binary, gas and binutils but again they already run on the i386 and only do one thing, all I did was tell them to open binary files in binary mode.

As always, in retrospect it’s damned obvious.

What is the story with Cygwin and fork bombing? I’ve used Cygwin extensively since Windows 95 and don’t recall anything of the sort, although I haven’t built anything myself on it for about 10 years. The one problem I do have with it is ironically the opposite – occasionally it will fail to fork a process when required, bringing down our software.

And forking is just so slow on Cygwin, enough that I’d go for mingw to avoid it if I was starting over now, but back when I started using Cygwin my porting skills wouldn’t have been sufficient.

Cygwin is the worst when it comes to this. Older cygwin1.dll will forkbomb machines without warning.

It was after first messing with dynamips that I had a forkbomb crash that I’ve done so much to steer clear of Cygwin. And it absolutely was the reason I did that re-build of dynamips on MinGW. Although now with the Linux subsystem on Windows it’s kind of mooit also inspired me to rebuild the early GCC/Binutils/GAS on MinGW so I can build early a.out kernels.

It’ll be interesting to see how effective Google is at jettisoning Linux from it’s #2 spot of poularity, mobile devices. I suspect Linux will reign Supreme on the server space for quite some time. Not until we have a generation that hates Unix.

Ah the binary hook fixes. It’s the insanity that made SimCity run, and eventually broke other stuff.

Ever since the MSDN crowd ousted the architecture group it’s been chaos for everything they touched (Windows 8).

The too late dance to phones and tablets was just that. It’s amazing how Linux succeed in user space by jettisoning as much as the user could see.

SQL Server 4.21 came out in 1993, so that’s pretty impressive, but what broke my faith in Windows software always working on Windows was that Visual C++ 6.0, which came out in 1998, stopped working when Windows 8.1 came out. I see that since I hit that roadblock people have figured out that the solution is renaming MSDEV.EXE to something else!!

I think I’ve only got one libc, and it’s pretty rare that I want to run old binaries – normally I can just recompile the old software for the new distribution, which is what I think is the nice thing.

I see it’s definitely hard to run a.out binaries! I managed to build the kernel module for the a.out format, but then I need the dynamic loader, and I found an old one but it just segfaulted. I also had to change some setting in SELinux that it said I really shouldn’t change, but then earlier today I ran across MS KB891667 which said I need to turn off DEP, so I guess Windows isn’t perfect in that regard either.

I think if I was going to run this old a.out version of DOOM I’d prefer to just run it under the old version of Slackware I used to run it under anyway to get the full experience 🙂

See and it’s exactly this that got me off of Linux. How many libc do I need? Isn’t it great when someone decides to remove stuff from said libc and break shit left and right, with the ‘fix’ either to pre-pend symbols to the dynalinker or rebuild libc myself so it doesn’t collide.

Not to mention the utter fantasy it is to take anything a.out and run it today, meanwhile SQL 4.21 from NT 3.1 runs on Windows 10.

Sorry, Linux suffers from the same catastrophic problems.

Of course neozeed I imagine you wouldn’t know what to do with all your spare time if it was so easy for you to compile things 🙂

Also, it is weird to see DosFreak without all the eyes and horns!