My beloved Auburn Tigers played in the SEC championship game in Atlanta Saturday where they fell again to Florida. But just getting the chance to play there was quite an accomplishment for coach Tuberville in only his second year. We'll be expecting even bigger things over the next couple of years, Coach.

Next we play the Michigan Wolverines in the Florida Citrus bowl; I was in school at Auburn the last (and, I think, only) time we played Michigan. That was in the Sugar Bowl with Pat Dye's first SEC champion ship team, in his third year as coach. It was Bo Jackson's sophomore year, but the game hero was senior Al Del Greco, who kicked a field goal on the last play of the game to give Auburn a 9-7 win. (Yes, that's the same Al Del Greco who kicked the winning field goal for the Tennessee Titans yesterday against the Philadelphia Eagles in Philly.)

Why is it so hard to get a gcc/gdb combination that works correctly on Solaris 2.8? I spent nearly two days trying to get a compiler that will produce code and a debugger that will report correct line numbers.

I'm no rookie at this; I've been building gcc for as long as I remember, but I've never had this kind of trouble. I tried gcc versions 2.7, 2.80, 2.90, and 2.95 (minor versions omitted), and gdb 4.15, 4.16, 4.17, 4.18, and 5.0. I also tried building gcc with and without the GNU binutils, versions 2.9 and 2.10. What eventually worked for me was binutils 2.9, gcc 2.95, and gdb 4.18. I know I must have been doing something stupid, but I never figured out exactly what.

Just as troubling is the problem on IRIX. The commercial, proprietary debugger on that system, for which we pay a metric buttload of money, barely works. It can attach to the process and look through memory, but it can't single-step through code. What a useless piece of junk! Unfortunately, gdb won't work with pthreads programs on IRIX, so it can't help us on that platform.

We have problems running the emulator on the new OI29 software. Last week, I found and fixed an addressing-mode problem, but there's at least one other problem that keeps us from running SPEC 71, the new GPCF screen. I'll keep plugging at it, now that I've got my debugger up and running again.

The ODS release is overdue. I have most of the code functioning, but I haven't finished writing the new man page, or the release notes. I hope to have time before the end of the year.