UNIX standard

[Guy Harris]

From: guy at Sun.COM (Guy Harris)

   We recently had some SUN reps come to give a presentation about SPARC.
   They were strongly suggesting that due to their relationship with AT&T
   (that is AT&T will soon sell SPARC) it will soon be the case that if you
   are not a SPARC machine you will not *really* be UNIX compatible.

If they were truly suggesting this, it merely indicates that Sun (not all caps,
PLEASE! - it's not an acronym for Stanford University Network when used to
refer to Sun Microsystems, Inc.)  salespeople are as 1) uninformed about
reality and/or 2) over-eager to sell their product as any other vendor's
salespeople.  If you are not a SPARC machine, you will be 100% UNIX-compatible
as long as you pass whatever validation suites the person asking you "are you
UNIX-compatible" wants to use, such as the SVVS.  The SVVS won't test whether a
machine is a SPARC or not.

There may be tests to see whether a SPARC-based machine conforms to the SPARC
Applications Binary Interface, but if there is there'll probably be similar
test for the 80386-and-up ABI, and the 68020-and-up ABI, and....

   They were talking about a coming binary standard, so that you could buy a
   program written for UNIX and know that it would run on your UNIX machine
   the same way you know that PC software will always run on your Intel/PC.
   This binary standard would assumably be based on the SPARC instruction
   set.

There are several binary standards arriving on the market.  For each one of
them, you could buy a program written for UNIX *and* compiled for the
architecture in question and know that it will run on UNIX machines using that
architecture.  There are, for example, standards coming out for the
80386-and-up family and for the 68020-and-up family.  There will be one for
SPARC.  There may well be others coming out for various non-"in-house-only"
chips (MIPS, Motorola 88000, etc.).

   Is this stuff true or is it just marketing hype? Is UNIX really going to
   become hardware dependent? What about all of us out here with our 680x0
   or 80x86 or VAXen or whatever? Are we going to be second-class UNIX users,
   unable to run the bulk of UNIX software? Can anybody out there clarify
   this?

They won't be able to run SPARC binaries, but SPARC-based machines won't be
able to run 68K binaries, either (unless somebody does emulation product - no
comment on whether such a thing exists, or is planned, or...).

It may be that some chips will end up having more UNIX software built for them
than others, and that the others will end up being "second-class UNIX users",
unable to run a lot of UNIX software.  Such are the vagaries of the
marketplace; there's no guarantee that SPARC will end up in one or the other of
those sets.  Obviously, we'd like it to end up in the former set, just as
Motorola would like the 68020-and-up and 88K to end up there, and Intel would
like the 80386-and-up to end up there, and MIPS would like the MIPS chips to
end up there, and....

Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 43