Subject: Porting Postgres to 486/SVR4

From: [email-masked] (Jon Fields)
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 93 22:13:19 EDT

Dear Postgres Community,

I am attempting to port Postgres to the Intel/System V Release 4.0
platform.  I have succeeded in getting things to compile and link,
but I cannot get past the `initdb' stage of bootstrapping the
system.  In particular, the first invocation of the Postgres backend
in the `initdb' script gets almost to the end of the local `.bki'
file, but then cannot create the btree index on the pg_attribute
table.  The backend says that it cannot locate the btree access
method.

The failure occurs in the SearchSysCacheTuple call made on
`catalog/defind.c' line 87.  I have followed the code with the
debugger, but quickly get lost in the Postgres cache internals.
Therefore, I thought that before I spent huge amounts of time trying
to debug the problem, that I might first consult the mailing list
for some direction.

My porting efforts so far have been directed toward the platform-dependent
include files in lib/H/tmp, particularly those which are concerned
with processor byte ordering.  I am hoping to use the SVR4
dlopen/dlsym/dlclose to handle dynamic loading; I have things
sketched out, but due to the above problems, have not been able to
get far enough to actually test out the code.

Any help or advice regarding this specific problem, or more
generally to porting Postgres to the 486/SVR4 platform, would be
greatly appreciated. (Note: I am using gcc.)

                        Regards,        

                        Jon Fields
                        [email-masked]