🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9398@swan.ulowell.edu> lavallee@hawk.ulowell.edu (Warren Lavallee) writes:
>
>	Has anyone successfully gotten an undump to work with TeX and/or
>LaTeX 2.9?  The one that comes with the distribution fails with a
>"inappropriate ioctl for device" error after a read.  Any help is
>greatly appreciated.

We have found that with the C version of TeX, it's really unnecessary
to build the undumped version, and in fact there are several advantages
in NOT doing so.  C TeX can read a .fmt file about as fast as the system
can page in the data from the large undumped executable, so typically
the execution time will be almost the same, or sometimes even faster
for the non-undumped version.  The disadvantages are the slight delay
upon startup and the fact that TeX's banner doesn't say what it is.
There are some example execution timings in the README file which
accompanies the current distribution of web2c.

The advantages of not undumping are that disk space is saved and more sharing
is possible.  For example, if one person is running plain TeX while another
is running LaTeX, in the non-undumped case they will be sharing the same
executable of virtex in memory.  It also allows you to build a "gargantuan"
TeX with a memmax in the 200,000+ range without paying much of a penalty.
Those pages of memroy are zero-demand-filled only when the user actually does
something complex enough to require them (such as use the PicTeX macros).
In the undumped case, on the other hand, each executable of a TeX this
size (one for plain TeX, one for LaTeX, etc.) will be over 3MB on disk.

There are several different mechanisms that can be used to get commands
like "latex", "tex", etc., to execute with the correct format file when
not using undump.  These options are discussed in the README file, so I
won't go into them here.

Tim Morgan
UC Irvine ICS Dept.