Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!shelby!Portia!forel!karish
From: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: BSD Unix on 6150-135?
Message-ID: <496@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 25 Feb 89 18:02:58 GMT
References: <1966@nmtsun.nmt.edu> <28304@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Sender: USENET News System <news@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Organization: Stanford University School of Earth Sciences
Lines: 62

In article <1966@nmtsun.nmt.edu> peter@hydrovax.nmt.edu says:
>   We have been toying for some time with the idea of running 4.3 BSD on
>our RT, being as RT-AIX is not a useful operating system. The IBM reps
>locally are only aware of a 'Univerisity' package that includes hardware
>and software. They claim that there are hardware changes in the boxes 
>running 4.3 BSD. Does anyone know of a commercially available 4.3 OS
>for the RT that do not require hardware changes?

IBM ACIS 4.3 (essentially vanilla 4.3 with extensions for the RT
hardware, plus a faster compiler and, now, NFS) runs fine on the same
hardware that runs AIX.  I've made the changeover from AIX by just
plugging in a 4.3 tape and following the instructions on the screen.
It's available only for university use, though, except for the 6152.

AIX 1.0 wasn't my idea of a solid operating system, but that was what,
four years ago?  Check out a current version.  The quality is good, and
there are some nice extensions that aren't available under 4.3.

Functional differences between ACIS 4.3 and AIX:

	- The ACIS driver for its async ports is broken.  Flow
	  control support is inadequate except at low speeds.
	  Ethernet communications work very well.

	  The AIX async driver works OK up to 9600 Baud.  As of version
	  2.2, AIX has 4.3BSD networking facilities.  I hope the 2.2.1
	  tty driver strips 8-bit characters properly; this is an
	  annoyance under 2.2.  I wind up using kermit instead of cu
	  for dialing out, since it does the stripping itself.

	- There's no support for emulating any well-known terminal
	  type on the ACIS console, unless you run X, which is not
	  supported on the 6153 console because it's too small to
	  support multiple text windows.  It's necessary to export the
	  termcap entry to the remote host, or use it to manufacture a
	  terminfo file.  I don't know what I'd do to communicate with
	  a non-UNIX system.

	  The AIX native console is an ANSI terminal emulator.
	  It supports multiple sessions, switchable by a hot key.
	  This makes life tolerable on a system without job
	  control.  For that matter, job control is required by
	  the POSIX FIPS, so I expect to see it in AIX some time
	  soon.

	- ACIS seems to have a better driver for the streaming tape
	  drive.  It'll keep the drive streaming on its own.
	  Under AIX, the user has to specify special command line
	  arguments to get reasonable performance.  These are just
	  impressions; I haven't made a detailed performance
	  comparison.

These comparisons are beside the point for most customers, because
IBM won't sell them ACIS.  Last year, someone in IBM sales
seemed to indicate that there might be some flexibility on this
point if a customer really had to have something from 4.3 if he
were going to choose to buy RTs.  This could have been intended
to get feedback on what the drop-dead features were that AIX
had to have to be salable in the technical workstation market.

	Chuck Karish	karish@denali.stanford.edu
			hplabs!hpda!mindcrf!karish