[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 31, Issue 9

Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com
Fri May 19 12:35:29 AEST 2006


> Michael Sokolov, it was, that writted:
>  [stuff]
> 
> ====
> 
> You silly, twisted boy, you.

Indeed.  Michael does not seem to have been taking his meds.  Nice guy but
a bit out there.

Tim wrote:
> A good example would probably be SunOS 4 - we already know that Sun are
> quite interested in open sourcing stuff given OpenSolaris, but SunOS 4
> hasn't been, presumably because it is full of stuff-they-don't-own and has
> no commercial value at all.

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.

> From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au>
> SMP support started earlier than 4.1.4.  The sun4m machines (SS470,
> SS670) were the first SMP machines and ISTR they were supported in

Um, search google groups for lm at 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



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