Re: Interrupt Handler Problems

[claveman@cod.nosc.mil (Charles H. Sampson)]

     I got several suggestions for ways to solve or work around our 
problem.  I'm grateful to all of the respondents.  Thank you.

     The best one came from Michelle Ulrich.  We had been doing dynamic 
linking, mainly because WindRiver lead us to believe that that was the 
preferred technique.  It's not clear in our particular case that this 
gives any benefits, but we followed their suggestion anyhow.  Following 
Michelle's lead, we switched to static linking and our interrupt han-
dlers began working.

     (For those not familiar with the VxWorks concepts, static linking 
is linking on the host, before downloading to the target.  Dynamic link-
ing is linking on the target, as part of the download.)

     It's not clear who the culprit is.  Michelle is using a different 
compiler.  However, it might be that WindRiver's documentation on the 
subject of dynamic linking is such that it lead both compiler writers to 
make the same mistake.  We've asked both WindRiver and Green Hills why 
they were unaware of the problem.  Neither has responded, after about a 
month.

     I hope no one else had to struggle through this problem because I'm 
so late in posting this but (sad story follows) ...

     Part of my work to be done before going on a long and long-planned 
vacation was to post this solution.  Two days before the start of the 
vacation, both my mail server (containing my correspondence with Mi-
chelle) and my development machine (where we were verifying that the fix 
was working) crashed hard.  They were still down when I left.  On re-
turn, the mail server was down again, for a different reason.  Also, the 
government facility that I use to post work-related news items had gone 
through a security frenzy, my password had been changed, and it took me 
three days to get a new password.  This on a completely unclassified 
computer that is not attached to any classified network.

     A propos of nothing, of course, but the worst confluence of prob-
lems I've had in my career.

				Charlie
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