Return-Path: smlieu Return-Path: Received: by cygnus.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA01714; Mon, 20 Dec 93 21:38:11 PST Date: Mon, 20 Dec 93 21:38:11 PST From: smlieu (Sun Ming Lieu) Message-Id: <9312210538.AA01714@cygnus.com> To: engnews-distrib Subject: Inside Cygnus Engineering - Vol 2 #12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vol 2 No 12 INSIDE CYGNUS ENGINEERING December 1993 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inside Cygnus Engineering (ICE) is published monthly for customers of Cygnus Support. Our objective is to provide a relevant but informal summary of news and ongoing activities. Please send all comments, suggestions, and subscription requests to engnews@cygnus.com. TABLE OF CONTENTS ----------------- . Q3 Shipment Status . Q4 Update . PRMS (GNATS) 3.2 . H8/300 gcc benchmarks . xmastree . Software Maintenance Status . G++ Progress . Customer Forum (Support on Sun platforms) . Customer Forum Responses (Printed documentation and ICE) . Season's Greetings PRODUCTS AND RELEASES --------------------- 1. Q3 Shipment Status Q3 progressive shipments have now been completed. If you have not yet received a part of your distribution, please contact us at production@cygnus.com so we can remedy this. 2. Q4 Update We have entered into the final round of building and testing of the Q4 progressive release. After the production difficulties with Q3, the project team reorganized some of the release to production schedules for Q4 and set up a more tightly coupled working relationship with our vendors. Assuming that no showstopper bugs are found in this last build, we expect to finalize the release before year end and complete all Q4 shipping by the third week in January. 3. PRMS (GNATS) 3.2 We have made a new release of PRMS, known on the Internet as GNATS (Gnats: A Tracking System). Major changes from the last versions (3.01) include the following: * The configuration of the local PRMS installation can now be modified without recompiling. * A new debugging mode allows PRMS administrator to test the system without sending mail to the submitters or the support contacts. * query-pr now supports regular expressions and has a new mail server. * prms.el now works with Emacs 19. * The directories have been reorganized to reflect GNU standards. * Many, many bugs fixed and minor features added. * Documentation has been completely revised. PRMS 3.2 is available for anonymous ftp from the usual GNU ftp sites as gnats-3.2.tar.gz. There is no patch relative to 3.01, since it came to about 500K (as compared to 650K for the tar). NEW AND ONGOING DEVELOPMENTS ---------------------------- 1. H8/300 gcc benchmarks As part of our expansion into the embedded marketplace, Cygnus now provides gcc for the Hitachi's H8/300 and H8/500 family of 8/16 bit microcontrollers. Recently, one of our customers compiled two of their applications and three synthetic benchmarks with several different compilers for the H8/300. Code Size Benchmarks: Traditionally, gcc has been regarded as the compiler of choice for high performance applications, and compact code has always been a secondary goal. The following results show that it compares very favourably with its competitors in the marketplace (the Hitachi, MRI, and Archimedes compilers). Cygnus Vendor: A B C D gcc -----------|---------------------------------------- Benchmark | % of average code size -----------|---------------------------------------- Bench 1 | 113 105 93 93 93 Bench 2 | 106 105 98 98 91 Dhrystone | 103 87 108 108 91 Sieve | 128 104 90 90 86 HMbit | 193 62 101 101 40 -----------|-------------------------------------- Average | 129 93 98 98 80 Execution Time Benchmarks: A performance benchmark using synthetic tests again shows gcc's superior performance. Cygnus Vendor X gcc Y Z -----------|----------------------------------- Benchmark | % of average exec time -----------|----------------------------------- Ackerman | 132 55 120 93 Benche | 103 77 92 129 Sort | 119 58 109 114 Dhrystone | 99 121 88 92 Fibo | 117 109 98 75 Matrix | 138 47 63 152 Opt | 160 77 91 72 Sieve | 101 69 75 156 -----------|----------------------------------- Average | 121 76 92 111 2. xmastree CHRISTMAS TREE LIGHTS UP VIA THE INTERNET [PRESS RELEASE] Dec. 7, 1993 - Employees of Cygnus Support in Mountain View, California, discovered when they came to work today that they can light the company Christmas tree without leaving their computer consoles. Engineers at this four-year-old software startup last night reprogrammed the company's internal computer network to enable users of the network to issue commands to the decorations on the tree. A Cygnus engineer sits in front of his Unix XWindows workstation and brings up a windowed, mouse-drive application called "xmastree". Clicking the mouse over the correct gadget turns on lights on the seven-and-one-half foot tall evergreen in the lobby of Cygnus Headquarters. Clicking the mouse over another gadget turns other decorations, including bubble lights and musical bells, on or off. Currently, only users on Cygnus's internal network can actually control the Christmas tree, but anyone at any Internet site anywhere can discover the current status of the Cygnus christmas tree by issuing the command, "finger xmastree@cygnus.com". The command will report whether the lights, bubbles, and bells are on or off. Cygnus engineers, when not playing with their Christmas toys, write and maintain software tools such as compilers, tools which enable programmers to create new computer programs. Since many of Cygnus' customers are engaged in embedded systems programming, Cygnus uses X-10 controllers to enable and disable target single board computers during testing. "Cygnoids" Jason Molenda and Brian Smith extended the principle to the Christmas tree this year and added the spiffy graphical user interface called "xmastree" for the amusement of their fellow employees. The cost of the decorations plus control hardware used on the tree itself (exclusive of the computers on the Cygnus network) was about $100. Not content with this, we have since taught xmastree@cygnus.com to respond to mail with a greeting card. So far it has received close to a hundred mail messages and been fingered about 5,000 times. The story has made it into various newspapers, including the Washington Post, and resulted in at least one parody on the Internet entitled "The Christmas Tree Massacre". SUPPORT ACTIVITIES ------------------- In addition to new development, a significant part of our engineering resources is devoted to answering questions, fixing problems in the GNU software, and providing a range of support services to our customers. 1. Software maintenance status The following table shows the maintenance statistics for the last five weeks. We continue to need your help: please let us know when you agree that a problem has been fixed so that we can move it from a "feedback" state to a "closed" state. # # # # # # Date Open Analzd Fdback Closed Suspnd Total ------------------------------------------------------------ 11/22/93 453 262 709 2,284 146 3,854 12/20/93 482 256 744 2,424 140 4,046 ------------------------------------------------------------ Change +29 -6 +35 +140 -6 +192 2. G++ progress In addition to the above set of numbers, we monitor our software quality and support through a number of different metrics. One of these is a count of the critical problem reports in the `Open' or `Analyzed' state. The goal is to have this number be as close to zero as possible. G++, as our implementation of the evolving C++ standard, has always featured prominently on the list of critical PR's, particularly thanks to the help of what the g++ engineers describe as our "stealth QA team" at UC Berkeley. Earlier in the fall, when we were up to 19 or 20 critical PR's, the g++ team set the goal of getting off the critical list and significantly reducing the number of PR's in open and analyzed state by year end. As of last Friday, there are no g++ PR's on the critical list, and the "Serious, high priority" PR's are also down by 40% since September. In addition, for the recent Free Software Foundation 2.5.x releases of gcc the g++ team provided over 200 kbytes in code changes - the results of over three months of work - to help make the FSF C++ compiler more reliable and useful to the Net. The ANSI C++ committee has also made significant progress in the C++ working paper at the recent San Jose meeting. A lot of the changes come from the process of defining and specifying behavior where the ARM was either ambiguous, silent, or contradictory; however some other changes address shortcomings of the language in the ARM. The g++ team hopes to be able to bring the most useful of these enhancements to you in the coming year as the committee stabilizes on the desired behavior of the different aspects of the language. OTHER ITEMS ----------- 1. Customer Forum We value your suggestions, and would like your response to the following questions (to engnews@cygnus.com). We will publish summaries of answers of general interest in the following issue. Support on Sun Platforms: While we are seeing an increasing interest in the new HP, SGI, and DEC workstations, the platforms from Sun still constitute our largest installed base (70% of all native compiler users). We are interested in finding out about the longetivity of the various Sun platforms within your organization so that we can adjust our matrix of supported progressive platforms to meet your needs. 1. Are you still using Sun 3's? If so, do you foresee phasing them out? 2. Have you migrated to Solaris? If not, do you intend to migrate? If so, when? 2. Customer Forum Responses In the November issue of ICE, we asked you about how you would like us to provide online and printed documents, and about your thoughts on the distribution policy for ICE. While there was a range of suggestions for documentation, the most common ones were for smaller, book like manuals with "perfect binding" (that would lie flat on a table), and change bars. Alternative online browsing systems, such as tkinfo/tkman, were also suggested. The responses about a wider and online distribution for ICE were positive and enthusiastic. 3. Holiday Calendar Cygnus Support will be closed for the following (US) holidays December 24 Christmas Eve December 31 New Year's Eve While we will not be officially closed in the week between Christmas and New Year's, we expect to have only a reduced staff in place. We will make best effort to meet your needs during this period. 4. Season's Greetings from all of us inside Cygnus engineering. Jean Marie Diaz system administration "A friend is someone who will help you move. A *good* friend is someone who will help you move a dead body." Bill Cox CHILL "Oshkosh in 1994, by homebuilt kitplane!" Per Bothner libg++, CHILL "We could also give the user community the impression the language was unstable and that we are a bunch of bozos." -- Stroustrup on C++, out of context Brendan Kehoe g++ hacker, author "The waters, I came to Casablanca for the waters." "But, we're in the desert." "I was misinformed." Brian Smith system tinker "Jack Frost roasting on an open fire..." Jeffrey Wheat testing "Set the gearshift for the high gear of your soul!" Jason Molenda support'r'us "That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer." -- Paul Leary Doug Evans gcc, eh "Mon pays, ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver." -- Gilles Vigneault David MacKenzie binutils, configure "When all else fails, read the directions. They probably need proofreading anyway." Mark Eichin kerberos, libraries, networking "People on the net are always telling other people to `get a life.' It would be so much simpler if there were one available under the GPL. `If you use this life, you must tell other people where to get a life of their own.' " -- Christopher Davis Fred Fish gdb, amiga, cool vacations "Gone fishing." John Gilmore founder and generalist "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows... On such a full sea we are now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures." -- William Shakespeare Stu Grossman gdb "Green eggs and ham, I will not eat green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Sam-I-Am." David Henkel-Wallace founder, hacker "The unplanned release of code that was expected last week did not materialize, but will be available very shortly." Ian Lance Taylor naps and everything "We are great fools. `He has spent his life in idleness,' we say; `I have done nothing today.' What, have you not lived?" -- Montaigne Jason Merrill g++, prms, vegetate "Please don't call me a murderer. I prefer 'Quality Control Technician for the Human Race'." Jack Woehr dos/win/nt/os2 "Spring .. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings yellow honey pollen of some unknown flowers." -- Zamyatin Jeff Osier writer "A modern US Navy cruiser now requires 26 tons of manuals. This is enough to affect the vessel's performance." Karen Christiansen software releases "Silence is golden." Jim Kingdon gdb "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." -- Weisert Kung Hsu gdb man on the spot "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." -- Picasso Mike Stump g++, test-o-matic "May your bread fall butter side up..." Pat McGregor speaker-to-programmers "Take life in big bites. Everything in excess. Moderation is for monks." Lazarus Long. Roland Pesch editor-in-chief "Just a symbol mechanic." Ken Raeburn gas, bfd "When are Captain Kirk and crew finally going to retire, huh?" Rob Savoye DejaGnu, climbing bum "It's snowing again! Yippie!" K. Richard Pixley gdb, cvs "Bugs don't scream when you hit them." Steve Chamberlain all around great guy "43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr Segmentation violation -- Core dumped" Sean Eric Fagan gcc, chocolate "Through thick or thin, rain or shine, she was always there for me, waiting, watching me with soulful eyes that seemed to know so much. Until the day she died, I had no better companion than Larry the Lounge Lizard, my pet leopard gecko." Stan Shebs JOAT, MON "Sooner or later, free software always wins. (So this sounds like marketing; so sue me.)" Sun Ming Lieu chief cat herder "Not to fear sea dragons is the courage of the fisherman." -- Zhuangzi Torbjorn Granlund gcc, simulation, arithmetic "Kalifornien ar nog bra, men det ligger lite avsides." Michael Tiemann founder and el presidente "There's no room for ego in a hot tub." Jim Wilson gcc and faster gcc "Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best." -- Oscar Wilde david z zuhn software releases "I'm not lost. I'm just not that allfire concerned about where I'm going." with glass bulbs, wires, x10 boxes and, gulp, software * *** / \ /o \ + + / \| |/ + o \ / | \ + / o \| + / o + \ The folks at Cygnus Support wish you a |/ | o \ + relaxing holiday season! / o \| + / o o o \ |/__ + __\ + / + o | \ + |/ | o \| Cygnus Support, + / + \ ``We make free software affordable.'' |/ o o | \ + /__ + o + __\| + / | o | \ + |/ o o o \| /___________ ___________\ | | |_| --------------------------------------------------------------------- Cygnus Support 1937 Landings Drive One Kendall Square Mountain View, CA 94043 Cambridge, MA 02139 +1 415 903 1400 voice +1 617 494 1040 voice +1 415 903 0122 fax +1 617 494 1325 fax ---------------------------------------------------------------------