I.5 Notes for Netware platforms
There doesn't appear to have been any interest in the Netware version of mpatrol
and as a result I will not be implementing any of the following features (or
fixing any of the following problems) in mpatrol for Netware. I don't even have
access to a Netware machine so someone else would have had to have done it
anyway.
- The library has not yet been built (let alone tested) on Netware platforms. The
names of the system functions that the library calls for Netware were obtained
by looking at Novell's developer documentation, so they may not even compile
correctly without modification.
- Need to add support for building the mpatrol library as an NLM. This is not
currently a high priority requirement as the archive library should suffice for
most purposes. However, if it is built as an NLM and
malloc()
and
related functions are dynamically linked in some executable files then perhaps
it would be possible to override these functions, thus getting the
--dynamic option in the mpatrol command to work.
- Need to add support for processors other than the Intel 80x86. However, about
99% of Netware platforms run on this processor family — does anyone really use
Netware with other processors?
- Need to add way to determine when the base of the stack has been reached during
call stack traversal, since on Netware every application is really a thread
running under one large process.
- Need to add support for reading symbols from Netware load modules. Also need to
add support for reading symbols from any NLMs that are required by the program.
This may be possible in a limited fashion by using the GNU BFD library, but may
only work with code compiled with gcc.
- Could add support for the EDIT and LIST options. This would
probably involve finding a way to invoke a batch file without having to search
for the batch file or allocating memory in the process.
- Add GUI support for the mptrace command.
- Need to investigate if it is safe (or even possible) to override the definitions
of
malloc()
, etc., without including the mpatrol.h header file
first. Currently, non-macro definitions for these functions have been disabled
in the Netware version of the library in case they affect other NLMs that are
currently running.