[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Berny Goodheart]

 I have been trolling these many threads lately of interest. So thought I should chip in.

"SVr4 was not based on SunOS, although it incorporated
many of the best features of SunOS 4.x”.

IMHO this statement is almost true (there were many great features from BSD too!).
SunOS 5.0 was ported from SVR4 in early 1991 and released as Solaris 2.0 in 1992 for desktop only.
Back in the late 80s, Sun and AT&T partnered development efforts so it’s no surprise that SunOS morphed into SVR4. Indeed it was Sun and AT&T who were the founding members of Unix International…with an aim to provide direction and unification of SVR4.
I remember when I went to work for Sun (much later in 2003), and found that the code base was remarkably similar to the SVR4 code (if not exact in many areas).

Here’s the breakdown of SVR4 kernel lineage as I recall it. I am pretty sure this is correct. But I am sure many of you will put me right if I am wrong ;)

From BSD:
TCP/IP
C Shell
Sockets
Process groups and job Control
Some signals
FFS in UFS guise
Multi groups/file ownership
Some system calls
COFF

From SunOS:
vnodes
VFS
VM
mmap
LWP and kernel threads
/proc
Dynamic linking extensions
NFS
RPC
XDR

From SVR3:
.so libs
revamped signals and trampoline code
VFSSW
RFS
STREAMS and TLI
IPC (Shared memory, Message queues, semaphores)

Additional features in SVR4 from USL:
new boot process.
ksh
real time extensions
Service access facility
Enhancements to STREAMS
ELF