*BSD News Article 36684


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From: njw@cs.city.ac.uk (Nick Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Using XFree 3.1 on FreeBSD 1.1.5.1: fails badly.
Date: 06 Oct 1994 08:47:36 GMT
Organization: Systems Architecture Research Centre, City University
Lines: 49
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <NJW.94Oct6094739@barney.cs.city.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: barney.cs.city.ac.uk


Seeing that 3.1 was kind of available, I tried using it yesterday,
with complete failure.  Is 3.1 "released" yet?

The problems I had were both in compiling from source and using the
pre-compiled binaries. 

1) In the source, the Imakefiles are a bit broken: within the xfree86
makefile, it uses a macro InstallGenManPageLong (I think that was it's
name), which is not defined anywhere.  Also, the
vga256/drivers/Imakefile will not build an SVGA server: the Imakefile
configurations simply don't setup right stuff.  With that said, I
managed to play around with these and get a server running.  It
crashed. Crashed quite a bit in fact.  Once, when the server seemed in
a bad state, I killed the server and the machine panic'd (closing a
file descriptor which was already closed). Not so good.

2) I then grabbed the XF86_SVGA binary distribution and attempted
that.  Seems more robust, however the server crashes quite frequently,
with signals 6, 8 and 11.  Here's a sample trace, after the X server
reported a signal 8:
  #1  0x828deb6 in end ()
  #2  0x49aa6 in ddxGiveUp ()
  #3  0x49b72 in AbortDDX ()
  #4  0x52949 in xf86SigHandler ()
  #5  0xefbfe108 in end ()
  #6  0x92796 in FindBestToScale ()
  #7  0x94af3 in BitmapOpenScalable ()
  #8  0x98da2 in FontFileOpenFont ()
  #9  0x6ef48 in doOpenFont ()
  #10 0x6f2bf in OpenFont ()
  #11 0x73bb5 in ProcOpenFont ()
  #12 0x7a3b8 in SProcOpenFont ()
  #13 0x7273f in Dispatch ()
  #14 0x66329 in main ()

The above problems are with an ET4000 system.  We hope to switch to
using Diamond Stealth boards here RSN, and so we'd appreciate finding
out if XFree86 3.x will actually work before we go and spend the money on
the boards.

-- 
Nick Williams, Systems Architecture Research Centre, City University, 
London, EC1V 0HB.  UK.

Web: http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/finger?njw
E-mail: njw@cs.city.ac.uk (MIME and ATK)
Work Telephone: +44 71 477 8551
Work Fax: +44 71 477 8587