The Ease library may be built for a number of different platforms. A platform in this case consists of a machine architecture, a mechanism for creating multiple Unix processes, and a mechanism for creating multiple threads (or light weight processes) within a Unix process.
The µSystem threads package provides pre-emptive threads. Thus running threads are time sliced. The time slice interval may be changed using the =t command line parameter. Setting this to 0 will switch off time slicing, which is advisable when debugging.
PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a library for creating multiple Unix processes across multiple machines and communicating between them. Ease can use this library on its own (in which case each /Ease process resides in a Unix process of its own), or in conjunction with a threads package.
In order to run an Ease application built using PVM, it is necessary to run the pvm daemon. This can be started using the command line pvm console pvm or the X-windows version xpvm. From the pvm console, extra hosts may be added to the virtual machine, running processes listed, killed, etc.
Once the pvm daemon has been started, Ease applications may be run either from a unix shell or from the pvm (or xpvm) console. In order for pvm to be able to run your application, you must specify the full path of your executable. Also, if run from a pvm (or xpvm) console, you must supply =1 as the first parameter to your executable. This informs the process that it is the initial process for the program (this is unnecessary when run from the command line). This is because a process determines whether or not it is the initial process by looking for the absence of a parent process and when started from a pvm console the console is its parent.
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