DOS Tasks under Unix: Let's hear about it!

[Kaare Christian]

> Guerry A. Semones:
> Okay folks, AT&T's 386 based unix for their work group series has
> been available for a short while.  Sun has announced and begun to
> ship their 386i Roadrunner series.  We're starting to see more and
> more 386 based machines running unix with dos as a subtask.  Some
> of us have these machines.  Some of us have only seen the demos.
> And some of us have only Heard about them.
>     How about some of you that have the fortune/misfortune (?) to 
> have this type of setup, let us know what you have been able to do
> with these machines.

I have a DataBank 386 @ 20 MHZ with 2MB of memory. It doesn't use cache,
and it seems to be 10-15% slower than the fastest 20MHZ 386 machines, such
as the Compaq and the Proteus. My 30 MB hard disk is half Xenix/VPix,
half DOS.

Xenix is rock solid, I've never had a crash. VPix is called a
"controlled" release, and it seems much less solid. The only software
that I've used with VPix is Microsoft C and Lotus Manuscript, plus a
bunch of small utilities and software that I have developed. Everything
works fine. Speed of DOS apps running under VPix seems the same as when
running under dos. I ran the dhrystone benchmark under vpix, and under
pure dos:

		NoReg	Registers
DOS		5952	6172
Xenix/VPix/DOS	5882	6024

The minor difference could be the VPix artifact, but it also could be due
to differences in clock accuracy, or the general variability of dhrystones.
In general, I don't use Dhrystones to make distinctions of less than
about 10 percent.

Installation was partly easy, and parlty difficult. The software is set
up so that it will automatically build a new kernel, and it does most
other chores. But after installation you still have to do some
permissions fixing, and other miscellaneous chores that are discussed in
a couple of different parts of the manual. It required one call to
support before I had things ok.

An InfoWorld review griped that VPix wouldn't correctly run 1-2-3. I
haven't tried 1-2-3, but I haven't experienced anything similar to what
InfoWorld reported.

I haven't tried any graphics apps, and I haven't tried to run VPix on a
supported terminal. But as a tool to let me run dos from within the
Xenix environment, it has worked fine. (My needs are modest, but it
nicely meets those needs.)

Last week I demoed a Sun 386i for a couple of hours. Its dos apps come up
in windows on the Sun display, rather than the screen switching (sco
calls it MultiScreens(tm)) technique used in Xenix/VPix. Text based
stuff seemed to work fine, and at normal speed. Graphics stuff switched
to a different window shape (2x1 aspect ratio, just like the cga aspect
ratio) and then seemed to run sluggishly. They worked, but I don't know
if you would really want to use them. The 386i was always busy, with a
load average of more than one even when we weren't doing anything. The
tech support person didn't seem too concerned, but getting rid of
whatever was causing that load might have made the graphics stuff work
faster. I ran dhrystones on the machine under dos, and got a figure of
about 6000, but I don't think it is valid beccause the machine wasn't
idle.

I also ran some standard Unix chores on the 386i. The machine wasn't idle,
but it wasn't as busy as during the dos work.

nroff -ms /dev/null			1 real
grep zoom /usr/dict words		1.6 real

The first result is about 4x faster than a VAX/780, the second is about
2.5x faster than a VAX/780. I didn't do anything to test compute bound
stuff or to test floating point.

Kaare Christian
Research Assoc., The Rockefeller Univ.