[techtalk] Intro (Q's on m68k, beowulf, SMP programming, and databases)

[TeknoDragon]

Greetings,

My wife (guess who!) seems to enjoy this list a lot so I thought I'd join
up (I seem to be doing this frequently). I'm Karl (aka Andross/TeknoDragon
depending on the medium of participation) a CS undergrad at WSU and a
"technopagan".

Right now I'm trying to squeeze MacOS down into 1024k or so so that I can
install m68k on a 4MB SE/30. I think i'm close, but every combination of
enabled and disabled extensions seems to result in memory usage, perhaps
I'll just go find some more ram.

I'm working on a database library idea and started investigated record
locking. I've got a system designed that's much lower level than
semiphores (which I'd need one for every record or a semaphored record
locking queue if I did it that way!) and hinges on the "testset" function
that my unix programming prof told me about. The only problem is that
testset doesn't seem to be in any manual or piece of documentation that I
can easily find. I'm thinking something like this: (which I might be able
to use as long as it's an attomic function and I'm not using SMP)

char testset(char *x){
	if(*x == 0) x++;
	else return x;
	return 0;
}

maybe this is an assembly function... might explain since I've been
looking for C stuff... ;->

but would behave slightly different in an SMP system, as such if it was
called simultaneously by every CPU it would return 0 to one procesor and
the value of x (or 1) to everyone else...

so naturally I'm wondering about beowulf (as we may be able to go SMP
without buying a new box, or not many more parts than we have, and beowulf
on a pair of clasic macs would be a hoot!), I've read just about every
SMP FAQ I can find, at least skimmed through... but still need to read up
on beowulf


finally I'm wondering what a good resource for database library
programming would be... while there are a few pittfalls in my system it
might be comprable to commercial ones, and would like to look into the
checks and balances of a modern database design...



here's some sites that might help you know me better

ghettobox.dhs.org
 andross.dhs.org
 colby.dhs.org
 segfaultthecat.dhs.org
 technopagan.dhs.org
 aps.dhs.org


-tekD


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