Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 31, Issue 9

Indeed. Michael does not seem to have been taking his meds. Nice guy but a bit out there. Tim wrote: I'm the guy who took SunOS 4.1.3 and removed all the non-free stuff from it (which was 90% STREAMS) and demo-ed it to McNealy in effort to set it free. A lot went into this: http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html There isn't much chance they'll release it and at this point it is so far behind I'm not sure I see the point. Even though that is the one kernel that I really loved. Um, search google groups for lm@slovax - that was a 470. It was most definitely not an SMP box though it was my favorite Sun machine. Great machine, my home machine is still named slovax in honor of that box (which was named slovax in honor of a Wisconsin 11/750 that held the 4.x BSD source which taught me more than anything else). And for those who care, slovax/470 now belongs to Theo Deraadt, I'm ashamed to say that I sold it to him so I could buy some parts for my VW van at the time. At the time I didn't have any money, if I could do it over again I would have given it to him. The 670 was an SMP, that's Chuck Narad's box. Pretty nice except that bcopy performance was really bad. ----- But the bigger point I wanted to make was to react to all the stuff about OSF/1 or Ultrix or Tru64 or AIX or whatever. Most of you probably have no idea who I am or what we do. I run a company that makes a software product which runs on all those old Unix platforms. We have all the boxen with all the various Unix versions. Other than SunOS 4.x, if they all fell off the face of the earth tomorrow I couldn't be happier. They suck. And even SunOS sucks in some ways, it's way behind Linux. I'm a file system guy, I'm the last guy who did anything significant to UFS (ask Kirk), and I have to admit that the Linux guys are in some ways running circles around the old school Unix guys. The one exception (that I know of) is ZFS. That's pretty cool, the Linux guys are unlikely to do anything that good, it's too complex. But my point is that the love for the old unix versions is mostly misplaced. V7, you bet. That teaches you "small" (as does Comer's Xinu work). But all of the vendor Unices, even my beloved SunOS, pale in comparison to Linux. Sad but true, I've spent a lot of time in the code. And in some ways it isn't sad at all, it's cool. Linux is free. The only sad part that I still see is maybe personal. I loved SunOS because working in it, as a young kid, I didn't know shit. But there I was, hacking away. When I started, wandering through the code made me feel like I was in a fog, I couldn't see the next step. But as time went on the fog cleared and I saw this very clear and clean architecture. It became something that you could really see and see why it was that way and see how you could extend it and see how you shouldn't extend it. The generic kernel source (take away drivers and file system implementations, but keep the VFS layer) is very small. I've lived for many years in SunOS, I've lived in IRIX, I've lived in SCO (which is more true to V7 than anything else), I've lived in Linux, I've read the HP-UX code, I haven't read Ultrix, OSF/1 or AIX, but the ones I know, they are all pretty simple. The only one that ever cleared the fog for me was SunOS, all the other ones looked like a mess which is why I don't share the sentiment that we should be crying over the loss of all the vendor Unices. I don't want to go back. Linux is pretty nice. Maybe they'll fuck it up, that seems to be a Unix OS tradition, but so far so good. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com