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PLEASE! The person who patched kernel/exit.c for 2.0.1 contact me

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JF Martinez

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Oct 15, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/15/96
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I have established than the patches in kernel/exit.c for going from
2.0.0 to 2.0.1 are the cause of the breaking of the game ABUSE in its
SVGA version.

When I apply to 2.0.0 all the 2.0.1 patches except this one then ABUSE
works. If I apply this patch it stops working.

I need to know before proposing their undoing why those patches were
made because I don't know if this a bug or (like in the 127.0.0.0 IP
address issue) it has broken software who was based on buggy
behaviour.

Fixing the ABUSE problem is important because:

1) It is commercial software so users cannot fix it.

2) If Linux starts breaking commercial software, commercial vendors
will flee and not return.

3) It is a very good game.

4) For attaining world domination the main thing an OS must have is:
lots of games. Did you believe DOS success was due to spreadsheets?
:))

--

Jean Francois Martinez

Bryn Paul Arnold Jones

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96
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On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, David S. Miller wrote:

> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:51:39 +0300 (EET DST)
> From: Linus Torvalds <torv...@cs.helsinki.fi>
>
> There must be people out there who used to do this kind of things
> with C64 games etc, and who'd love nothing better than to try to
> fix abuse, right?
>
> I find myself constantly fixing stupid bugs in the solaris2.5 kernel
> binary using hex-patch tools to rewrite the broken code, compared to
> this fixing Abuse should be a piece of cake.
>

Why not just ask them to fix their source, and rebuild, they love linux
anyway (go look at http://crack.com, and see what I mean).

> David S. Miller
> da...@caip.rutgers.edu
>
Bryn
--
PGP key pass phrase forgotten, \ Overload -- core meltdown sequence
again :( and I don't care ;) | initiated.
/ This space is intentionally left
| blank, apart from this text ;-)
\____________________________________


Linus Torvalds

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96
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On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Bryn Paul Arnold Jones wrote:
>
> Why not just ask them to fix their source, and rebuild, they love linux
> anyway (go look at http://crack.com, and see what I mean).

They may. Dave Taylor is a nice guy, and he might rebuild it for us. On the
other hand, the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops.
Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.

I just _know_ that there is somebody out there that has too much time on his
hands (or rather, he has time on his hands better spent doing something
productive like reading for exams or doing real work, and he'd much rather
spend the time on something else). Now, that somebody out there has a
"mission in life": to binary-patch a game to make it work on a newer version
of linux?

"To boldly binary patch commercial programs where no commercial program has
been binary patched before..". Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Now the
question is just: "Who is first?"

Linus

Simon Karpen

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96
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I've done binary patching before, both with sed and with GNU
Emacs. I know it's not everyone's favorite editor, but it does have
search and replace features, and is 8-bit clean. I've patched programs
under both Linux and SunOS (the Linux one was, ages ago, part of getting
Doom to run with an 8-bit soundcard, the SunOS one was changing the
hard-coded path for the cache for netscape 1.0 to /dev/null, so that
netscape wouldn't read and write huge amounts of data from people's
NFS-mounted home directories)

Simon Karpen
kar...@rpi.edu, s...@karpes.stu.rpi.edu
Computer and Systems Engineering at RPI


Dan Merillat

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96
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On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Bryn Paul Arnold Jones wrote:

> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 17:39:48 +0100 (BST)
> From: Bryn Paul Arnold Jones <bp...@gytha.demon.co.uk>
> To: Linus Torvalds <torv...@cs.helsinki.fi>
> Cc: "David S. Miller" <da...@caip.rutgers.edu>, j...@sidney.remcomp.fr,
> linux-...@vger.rutgers.edu
> Subject: Re: PLEASE! The person who patched kernel/exit.c for 2.0.1 contact me


>
> On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> >
> > "To boldly binary patch commercial programs where no commercial program has
> > been binary patched before..". Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Now the
> > question is just: "Who is first?"
> >
> > Linus
> >
>

> Next thing someone's going to write a bindiff/binpatch suite (a free one).
> I can see the reasoning behind that, especialy if we were breaking it at
> 2.1.1, but as it's at 2.0.1, a lot of people are going to want a fixed
> version that will work with 2.0.22 (or will it be .23 ?).
>
> Not that many people are compitent, or willing to attempt to binary patch
> it ("Scares the willies out of me").

What, you don't use sed to patch binaries? (I have... not fun)
Great for fixing typos without the source!
sed s/reallylongstring/shortstring\0<pad to the end of longstring/ < file
> file~
then check they are the same size.

;-)

seriously though, there should be a binary patcher out there somewhere...
I mean, this is the unix world, so someone must have one. (Like David
said, some people need to fix kernel bugs WITHOUT kernel source)

Hmm... how would you find an old, useful program? If I go searching
for "binary editor AND unix" all I'm gonna find is new super duper version
17.9 with bugs galore... Well I'll keep an eye out and look through
archives of comp.sources.unix for something.

Hey, try this:

uuencode
patch (yea, the same one we use on linux kernels)
uudecode

The patch shouldn't take up more lines then you have code changes. If it
does, you broke the binary (shifted bytes)

2 good reasons:
A) everyone has the tools
B) you can distribute the patches in plain text

--Dan

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