[Geekos-devel] Some help regarding a well known error

[Juan P. G. <48...@gm...>]

Hello list,

My name is Juan Garcia, a new user of GeekOS.
Thanks for creating such interesting operative system learning environment.
We are planning to use it in Operative Systems classes on our
University (Universidad Tecnologica de Pereira, in Pereira, Colombia).
As an assistant to the professor, I got the job of testing the
projects, GeekOS and figuring a way for teaching the course using the
lab you developed.

I'm deeply sorry if I didn't saw this question I'm posting in the
later list archives, but as the archives are kind of filled with spam,
I didn't found it.
However, while compiling the project0, and after doing all the right
steps (found in the Hacking GeekOS document):

$ startProject project0 /home/userdungeon/geekos-0.3.0/src
<comment> I had to figure which was the last parameter as the
documentation doesn't mentions it, and yes, I have set the environment
variable GEEKOS_HOME.
$ cd project0/build
$ make depend
<comment> No need to document this process. It runs fine actually!
$ make
<comment> Runs perfectly, until...
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
In file included from ../src/geekos/gdt.c:11:
../include/geekos/segment.h:43: warning: 'packed' attribute ignored
for field of type 'uchar_t'
make: *** [geekos/gdt.o] Error 1

And that's all. I found a possible solution reading this:
http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/pipermail/lugsb/2008-February.txt ,
removing PACKED actually works, actually, it compiles without
problems. However, I'm worried that maybe it's a mistake to remove
that, as any unexpected casting would probe be problematic. Can anyone
give me some pointers on this issue?
FYI, I'm using gcc version 4.1.2.20061115 (prerelease) on Debian
4.1.1-21, nasm 0.98.38 20050517, gawk 3.1.5, perl 5.8.8, binutils
2.17-3, gmake 3.81, grep 2.5.1 and diff 2.8.1. I'm worried that
something went wonky in my toolchain.

As I'm speaking, I'm also testing this in Windows (as some students
really aren't willing to migrate to Linux for this assignment). I will
post any insights on this affair.
If this OS Laboratory project takes off, I'll be willing to contribute
translating all source code comments and most of the documentation to
spanish, and releasing publicly any slides and handouts we create for
the assignment.

Thanks in advance for your help, and thanks for making GeekOS, it's
such a nice opportunity to get to learn OS from the roots.

Juan Garcia
Assistant
E.C.S. Student