Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ucsd!nosc!humu!uhccux!martin
From: martin@uhccux.UUCP (Brian Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: A/UX disk I/O (real numbers)
Message-ID: <1607@uhccux.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 88 10:39:47 GMT
References: <6@fishpond.UUCP> <219@eos.UUCP>
Reply-To: uhccux!medix!martin (Brian K. Martin, M.D.)
Organization: U. of Hawaii, Manoa (Honolulu)
Lines: 44

In article <219@eos.UUCP> jaw@eos.UUCP (James A. Woods) writes:
>From article <6@fishpond.UUCP>, by fnf@fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish):
>> 
>> 					Amiga	Amiga	Mac-II	Sun
>> 					Floppy	CLtd	A/UX	3/50
>> 					df1:	dh0:	HD80SC	
>> 
>> Read speed,    512 buffer (byte/sec)	11014	17133	55168	240499
>> Read speed,   4096 buffer (byte/sec)	12024	17133	53708	234057
>
>for the mac2, these numbers harden the very rough timing for
>
>	time cat /usr/dict/words > /dev/null
>
>(~200K bytes in four CPU seconds) done on an beta a/ux a year ago.  it
>looks almost entirely due to the speed of the system5 vs. bsd4.2 filesystem.
>considering how much other bsd stuff apple picked up,
>why they didn't go for the berkeley filesystem is beyond me ...

Actually, they did go for the Berkeley file system. I was at an A/UX
demo last week, and managed to corner their engineer. It turns out that
they are using an antiquated version of the Berkeley file system, back
before symbolic pointers were introduced.

Some other interesting points...  Although Apple bundles in the
Documenter's Work Bench, their troff doesn't produce Postscript
output.  You still need to buy one of the 3rd-party troff packages that
supports Postscript.

The "site license" for A/UX is $25,000. But they didn't know how a site
license would be handled, e.g., whether one Apple-supplied disk would
be sold to the user, from which multiple copies of A/UX would be loaded
onto other disks.

Security might be a problem. It seems that you could boot the Mac OS,
then use a Mac program to scan and modify i-node information on the
A/UX disk, effectively bypassing the /etc/passwd and /etc/group
protections. The Apple engineer didn't have a good answer to this
potential problem; perhaps someone else does.

Regards,
	Brian K. Martin, M.D.

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