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From: mwm@fenris.relay.pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: SVR4 vs OSF/1 (Was Re: A3000UX competition)
Message-ID: <MWM.90Dec7185555@fenris.relay.pa.dec.com>
Date: 8 Dec 90 02:55:55 GMT
References: <2346@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
	<MWM.90Dec6205427@fenris.relay.pa.dec.com>
	<1990Dec7.201504.11469@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
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In-Reply-To: torrie@Neon.Stanford.EDU's message of 7 Dec 90 20:15:04 GMT

In article <1990Dec7.201504.11469@Neon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Evan James Torrie) writes:
     Just take a look at the things that OSF have chosen, vs what SVR4
   will have...  for example, the multiprocessor Mach kernel, the
   HP/Apollo networking stuff (vs what many people call "brain-damaged"
   NFS), the Application Neutral Distribution Format, etc.

Actually, most of the spiffyness in OSF1 (that's the way it's spelled
on OSFs literature) isn't from Mach, it's from somewhere else. For
instance, the multi-threaded kernel is from Encore (based on Mach,
though). It uses Posix threads instead of the Mach version. The
dynamic loader is from OSF. Ditto for the user-mode stream modules and
(I think) the user-mode memory managers.

Of course, Mach makes all this possible in a reasonable manner. I
don't even want to think of trying to do most of this in a
conventional Unix kernel.

     It seems ironic to me that Amiga users (known for rejecting old
   existing standards, and instead taking the superior solution) are
   touting the greatness of SVR4 (as opposed to Mach, for example, which
   forms the basis of OSF/1)...

It's even more ironic when you consider a list of really nice features
of AmigaDOS: shared libraries; user-mode mountable (and dismountable)
device drivers; the ability for applications to put hooks in the input
stream; a message passing kernel. Lightweight tasks in a shared
address space; runtime reconfiguration of just about everything.

OSF1 has all those things. VR4 may have one, but it's not required to
meet the SVID. If the NeXT moves to OSF1, it'll also have all those
things.

Of course, it'll _still_ look like Unix. But you can't have it all.

	<mike
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