I tried to run the FreeBSD binary of CVSup under BSD/OS, but it dumped core right away. Isn that supposed to work?
Yes, the statically linked FreeBSD binaries work fine under other BSD-derived operating systems. But for some of them, including BSD/OS, you have to add “@M3novm” to the command line. CVSup is written in Modula-3, and its runtime system uses a sophisticated garbage collector which exploits hooks into the VM subsystem of the operating system to gain better interactive performance. This feature stumbles upon an incompatibility between BSD/OS and FreeBSD, causing the core dumps. The cryptic argument “@M3novm” disables the VM hooks and makes it possible to run FreeBSD binaries under other BSD-derived operating systems. Also, recent versions (4.0 and later) of BSD/OS cannot run ELF format FreeBSD executables. But they can run the older a.out executables without problems. • The CVSup client dies with a segmentation violation when I try to use the GUI. The message looks like this, right? *** *** runtime error: *** Segmentation violation – possible attempt to dereference NIL *** pc = 0x81f0708
