Disturbing News re. DEC and UNIX

[George R. Boyce]

>From DECUS I have a document which lists the mods made to v1.1 of
ultrix in order to get v1.2. In sort DEC has:

	1. ported System V IPC facilities including shared memory
	semaphores, message queues, and named pipes. Shared memory
	segments are virtual and are eligble for paging and swapping.
	Named pipes use sockets for actual data transfer.

	2. added System V system call interface. A compile time
	environment variable and/or compile switch (-Y) selects
	whether the System V libraries are searched first or last.
	This work was based on the work of Douglas Gwyn of BRL.

	3. *not* ported any System V section (1) commands and
	utilities except for ipcs and ipcrm.

	4. very good conformance with System V as measured by
	the System V Interface Definition published by AT&T. The
	small differences are in the area of error codes returned
	by some of the system calls.

The above is paraphrase of a paper titled Evaluation of System V
Compatibility in Ultrix-32 V1.2 written by Gregory Depp and
David Ballenger of DEC.

I have complete faith that the BSD4.2 basis of Ultrix will continue
to be what Ultrix is all about. But the above additions sure look
nice to me. Oh, the also added the BSD4.3 speedups but not xns or nfs.
I understand that they are fixing a few problems before they announce
distributed file system support.

George Boyce, Cornell Computer Services, george at cornell