Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!kiwi!chet
From: chet@kiwi.CWRU.EDU (Chet Ramey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: curious
Keywords: IBM, AIX, RT, Opinions.
Message-ID: <808@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu>
Date: 12 Oct 89 18:18:55 GMT
References: <27415@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <17120@rpp386.cactus.org> <899@gort.cs.utexas.edu> <178@ursa-major.SPDCC.COM>
Sender: news@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu
Reply-To: chet@kiwi.INS.CWRU.Edu (Chet Ramey)
Organization: CWRU Information Network Services
Lines: 46

Jason Levitt <jason@cs.utexas.edu> asks:
>>Could we get some feedback from people who are not working at IBM

and Steve Dyer <dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.COM> obliges:
>I haven't had a whole lot of AIX/RT experience.  My brief experience with
>led me to conclude that the latest (2.2.1) wasn't too bad, although it
>still gave you this weird feeling of coming out of an entirely different
>"culture", although it had now seemed to have completed "UNIX as a 2nd
>language." :-)

It flunked the networking part of the course, though.  We tried doing some
development on RTs (135s, 115s) running AIX 2.2.1 and were just stopped
dead in our tracks by the awful NFS implementation.  Programs residing on
an NFS-mounted file system got memory faults and dumped core 60-70 % of 
the times they were executed.  Running dbx on a program residing on an
NFS-mounted file system could reproducibly crash the system.  The TCP/IP
implementation was hard to install and configure and fragile when it was
finally running.  The name server interface (gethostbyname() and so on)
could not properly reverse-map IP addresses to host names (ftp 129.22.8.15
would sit there for a while, then report failure trying to do a name
lookup).  This is after you figured out how to set the name server up in
the first place, which was explained nowhere.  I could go on and on...

Other than that, the things I missed were job control (of course :-), the
user interface of the BSD terminal driver (though I got to kind of like
the Sys 5 termio programming interface before we pitched AIX), and a lot
of little BSD utilities (like gprof, more, diff -c, stty).

>AOS on the RT is fantastic, as has been said here again and again, and
>would be unbeatable if the High C compiler could be shaken out a few
>times more.  AOS really shows off the machine well.  I prefer it to
>a Sun 3 or MicroVAX II development environment.

Yeah, it's great.  I don't know if I prefer it to a Sun-3 development
environment simply because I'm addicted to gdb, which does not yet run on
AOS (I prefer it to a Sun-3 in most other respects, however).  The HC
compiler does suck, but I picked up a copy of gcc 1.35.99 that has been
ported by a guy at NYU, and it seems to generate runnable code (but not
debuggable -- dbx just throws up all over gcc's output, even though that
output runs).  Rumor has it that gdb is "just around the corner" as well. 

Chet Ramey
Chet Ramey			"We are preparing to think about contemplating 
Network Services Group, CWRU	 preliminary work on plans to develop a
chet@cwjcc.INS.CWRU.Edu		 schedule for producing the 10th Edition of 
				 the Unix Programmers Manual." -- Andrew Hume