From: ftp-bimas.cit.nih.gov                         Last Mod: October 6, 1997

            FASTLINK Portability Information for Digital UNIX

Digital UNIX is an implementation of UNIX currently used on most DEC Alpha
workstations. Earlier versions of Digital UNIX were called OSF.

The code for FASTLINK 2.2 and beyond compiles fine on Digital UNIX. In
version 2.1 of FASTLINK it is necessary to comment out the definition
of uchar in commondefs.h. No modifications are needed to the
Makefile. 

Unfortunately, there are some problems with the implementation of
floating point on the Alpha, which may interact badly with any or
all of the compilers and FASTLINK. The bad behavior you get is
a floating point exception and a core dump. I recoded some lines
in FASTLINK to work around one manifestation of the problem, however,
Martin Farrall reports that he still has a problem using the cc compiler
with -O2 level of optimization (interestingly, both -O1 and -O3 seem
to work).

If you hit a floating-point exception, please perform as
many of the the following experiments as you can before reporting the 
problem to me:

You can recompile the program with the following compiler flags added:

1. Flag -ieee_compliant and without -O

2. Without -O and -ieee_compliant.

3. With -O1 and without -ieee_compliant.

4. With -O2 and without -ieee_compliant.

5. With -O3 and without -ieee_compliant.

and rerun in each case to see if a crash occurs.  These flags should be
added by editing the line in the Makefile that reads:

  #SYSDEP =

For example, to add the flag -ieee_compliant, change it to:

  SYSDEP = -ieee_compliant

To run parallel FASTLINK, refer to README.p4 for Digital UNIX-specific notes.
