Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!geac!torsqnt!tmsoft!becker!bdb
From: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: (Free) book on the Amoeba distributed system available
Message-ID: <6548@becker.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 90 00:20:48 GMT
References: <6067@star.cs.vu.nl> <2604@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca> <6106@star.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Organization: G. T. S., Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 50

In article <6106@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
|In article <2604@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca> utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN) writes:
|>Sounds like Amoeba is quite close to QNX.  QNX also has the virtual machine,
|>the same kernal design, the same high-speed features.  And QNX has years
|>of a good track record.
|>	Ron
|
|
|I thought QNX was basically a UNIX-clone.  You log into one specific machine
|and work there, with access to others via rlogin and explicit file motion.
|Correct me if I am wrong.  

	You are about to be corrected  8^) -
	QNX is a fully distributed message-passing
	system with remote task execution and
	resource access as an integral part of
	the system.

|In Amoeba you just log in.  When you say the equivalent of ls -l, you see
|a bunch of files.  Some might be in your machine room, and the rest might
|be spread over a dozen sites in as many countries.  You can't even tell
|where they are unless you look hard.  When you start make, it runs all
|the compilations on as many processors as it can find, in parallel.  This
|is what I mean by a distributed system--there is no concept of a home machine
|where work is done by default.  There is just a big pool of resources which
|the system allocates automatically.  Is QNX like that?

	More or less. All resources can be allocated
	to a job, including cpu, memory, files, disk
	drives, modems, etc. The difference is that
	you can tell (until the new version this
	year perhaps) where the resource lives, but
	you treat it locally (except for diskette
	drives - inserting a diskette halfway across
	a continent is a bit inconvenient 8^). One can
	get an executable from one machine, execute
	it on another, and have the screen/kybd i/o
	sent to your own machine - all simple to do,
	built in to the system. The name space isn't
	as global as the way you describe, in the current
	version - I imagine better name space management
	might come with the POSIX version due out this
	spring...

Cheers,
-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ontario
a /i/	 Internet: bdb@becker.UUCP, bruce@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu
 `\o\-e	 UUCP: ...!uunet!mnetor!becker!bdb
 _< /_	 "Paranoia is its own reward" - W. Disney