Future at Berzerkeley

[Wm. E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <28955 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:

| In fact, I believe that latter example should be enough to answer the
| question. How exactly are you going to exploit the parallel hardware
| you're going to be screaming for soon (:-) with SysV or OSFix?

  I'm not sure just what you have in mind... SysV does multiple
processors now (UniCOS, etc) and V.4 is going to have Sun lightweight
processes (it hasn't been pulled, has it?).

| I'm just having trouble seeing your point, do you think operating
| systems are "finished" with the release of SysV/OSFix? Or do you see a
| lesser percentage of folks running research versions?

  UNIX and "operating systems" are not the same thing. After SysV.4
when most of the stuff which distinguishes BSD from SysV is in SysV,
will researchers want to continue to try to keep upgrading their
reasearch system to include SysV stuff (yes folks, msg queues, named
pipes, lp spooling, shared memory, and even mmap when it comes are
useful)? If I were doing research I'd rather write new utilities,
develop new applications, and design new {filesystems, swapping,
networking}.

  If someone is going to write a new o/s that's one thing, but to write
another UNIX, ho hum.

  You're right, I don't see a lot of research versions. I would bet that
most of the sites running BSD don't do research, they just need some
feature not currently in SysV. If SysV will do the jobs and have better
support, they will run SysV. All predicated on vendors putting their
policy where their money is.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at crd.GE.COM)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me