Uniflex OS, Force Computers?

[John Temples]

In article <3069 at kitty.UUCP> larry at kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) writes:
>In article <180 at intek01.UUCP>, mark at intek01.UUCP (Mark McWiggins) writes:
>> Any body have experience with these?  Force makes real-time VME-based
>> single-board machines running Uniflex, and we're considering them
>> for a project.
>	UniFLEX is the most awful "lookalike" to UNIX that I have ever seen.

I'll second Larry's opinion.  We evaluated UniFLEX on a Force VME board. 
The hardware itself seemed fine, but UniFLEX's claims of being "UNIX-like"
were quite bogus.  A couple additional problems we found not mentioned in
Larry's posting were:
 
The size of the code space had to be a power of two bytes.  For larger
programs, you jumped from 256K to 512K to 1024K, and if you had 1MB of RAM,
you couldn't run a program that should have had a 600K executable.

malloc(3C) was incredibly slow.  A program we compiled which did a lot of
memory allocation would take _several seconds_ to do the mallocs.

Needles to say, UniFLEX went back to the vendor.
-- 
John Temples - UUCP: {uiucuxc,hoptoad,petsd}!peora!rtmvax!bilver!jwt!john