Buying UNIX for a clone

[James Deibele]

In article <15283 at life.ai.mit.edu> lethin at ai.mit.edu (Richard A. Lethin) writes:
>It seems that everyone is offering System-V.  This is unfortunate,
>since I am familiar with Berkeley-style UNIX, but I'm told that System
>V version 4 incorporates lots of Berkeley stuff.  Great!  But I'm told

"System V Release 4.0 also provides a full BSD environment and source-level
compatibility for 4.2 and 4.3 BSD".  So they claim ... and it's a little
early to tell for sure.  But reported results so far seem to be encouraging.

>We still need to write our own device driver.  ESIX says that they
>don't have much documentation, but that someone could "easily buy the
>book on system V and write their own".  But we need a Release 4 book.
>All we need is a vanilla device driver that would let me "peek" and
>"poke" into our board's address space.

What would you like?  Prentice-Hall publishes the official AT&T documentation,
which includes "UNIX System V/386 Release 4 Device Driver Interface/Driver-
Kernel Interface Reference Manual" (With this manual, experienced C programmers
have the reference information needed to create, modify, and maintain device
drivers in the UNIX System V Release 4 environment.  It describes both the
DDI and DKI interfaces in four sections: introduction, driver entry points,
kernel functions, and data structures.  Portability and scope are addressed
and two appendices cover error codes and migration from Release 3.2 to 4.  List
price is $28).  There's also the UNIX System V/386 Release 4 Programmer's 
Guide: SCSI Interface which lists for $15.

>Interactive Systems Corp. Version 4 not available until Q1'92.

Is that '92 or '91?  I thought that Interactive basically was going to re-label
Intel's 4.0.

I've seen basically good things about Dell 4.0, and I wouldn't trust Microport
or UHC.  I just don't think they'll be around in a couple of years, and that's
especially true given some of the horror stories about customer support.  I
like the attitude of ESIX towards customer support: call them, tell them your
problem, and they help you fix it.  No $500 or $600 support contracts, no
reciting of mother's maiden name, or the 25-digit number on the 15th disk
that you have locked in the closet.
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