SysVR4?

[Dave Bloom]

In article <40416 at pyramid.pyramid.com> Carl S. Gutekunst writes:
>
>
>  SVR4 is like one of those patchwork monsters in the old Japanese movies. A
>  piece here, a piece there, all glued together. It's big, crufty, unmaintain-
>  able, and slow. File System Switch *and* V-nodes? Wollongong TCP/IP? Gag me
>  with an Ethernet transceiver! Note too that AT&T is only taking the very
>  best of SunOS, those things that make the biggest splash. Lots of smaller
>  things they are doing themselves, and *not* doing them in ways that are
>  compatible. Guy Harris's streams TTY driver is a beautiful bit of work, but
>  AT&T rolled their own, and I hate to think what it looks like.

I agree, V4 is big... yet what would you expect?  To combine the functionality
of a number of variants you're going to have alot of redundancy, yet I like
the way AT&T's going about it. (Even though that's not the 'chic' thing to
say nowadays)  The compatability libraries for 4.3BSD will allow a user to get
up and running fast with a majority of his software intact. The V-node idea,
while not optimal, preserves EVERYONE'S investment whether it's in NFS, RFS,
SysV or Berkeley 'fast'. It was my understanding that AT&T was DROPPING
Wollongong and Sun was doing the TCP/IP implementation.

>  Merging is still a long way off. SVR4 and SunOS 4.0 are evolutionary, just
>  another step in a long process. Note that SunOS has lots of dualport-like
>  hooks, ways to give the user the choice between System V semantics (so they
>  can come closer to passing SVID) and BSD semantics (which is what all their
>  customers are used to). As long as Sun has to have a dualport mechanism, so
>  certainly will Pyramid.

Those 'hooks' will exist in V4 except perhaps in the opposite direction...
and since SystemV is adopting things like reliable signals and the unified
file system, it will look more like SunOS to begin with. I think you'll see
Sun embracing V4 as their own.

>  SVR4 still smells like System V. I don't like System V. Neither does the
>  vast overwhelming majority of Pyramid's customer base. They buy because of
>  the att universe. They live in the bsd universe.

This means absolutely nothing to me... it's something I expect to hear from
our students, not from you Carl.  With much of the Berkeley 'look&feel'
preserved, and such niceties as job control and C-shell standard, I imagine
a majority of those BSD bigots will be as happy as a pig in... mud.
What V4 will accomplish, as I see it, is what OSx did, without having to choose
between att and ucb universes, and it paves the way for a true unified
standard which we can all rally around.

>  I am increasingly coming to agree with the "Hamilton Group" assertions. AT&T
>  and Sun will exchange the first and the best of everything with each other,
>  and the rest of us will get the crumbs.

I hope Pyramid agressively pursues the SystemVRel4 standard... without a doubt,
with the talent that they've already showed with OSx they could do a wonderful
job, crumbs or not.
_______________________________________________________________________________
rutgers\                                                 | Dave Bloom
 galaxy >!andromeda!dave -or- dave at andromeda.rutgers.edu | Work: (201)648-5085
pyramid/                                                 |