Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!gatech!utkcs2!cygnusx1.cs.utk.edu!moore From: moore@cygnusx1.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt Subject: Re: 4.3 on the RT, request for problems, bugs, etc Keywords: 4.3bsd, PC-RT, bugs Message-ID: <833@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> Date: 12 Apr 89 02:16:15 GMT References: <19072@joyce.istc.sri.com> <4456@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> Sender: news@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu Reply-To: moore@cygnusx1.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) Organization: CS Dept -- University of TN, Knoxville Lines: 63 brunner@joyce (Thomas Eric Brunner) writes: >I'd like to know what other users of the rt as a 4.3 platform have >collected in the way of unfixed bugs or undesirable features, as well >as their experience with IBM's support for the current release. Scott Schwartz replies: >My impression, as a grad student who is not in any way speaking for >the department, is that the (unix) programmers at IBM Palo Alto are >doing a pretty good job, but that somebody higher up couldn't care >less about offering 4.3BSD as a (viable) product and is seeing to it >that anyone who tries to get it and make it work is given a hard time. >This might be totally off base, in which case I apologise for doubting >such a fine company as IBM, but it sure seems that way to me. My impression is that IBM would really like to support only one UNIX for RTs, and that they have a difficult time understanding why lots of us prefer 4.3 to AIX. The fact that they support 4.3 at all is to their credit, when some other manufacturers seem to be moving away from 4.3. >Three general problems: (1) The 6152's malfunction at will; if they >have to deal with an ethernet, for example. (2) X11R3 doesn't work on >any flavor of RT. (3) The C compilers IBM ships generate bad code. (1) I can't speak for 6152's. We don't have any here. (2) X11R3 works fine for me on a 6150 and a 6151. It did require a few patches. This is with the December 1988 release of 4.3, but I had a reasonable server working with a much earlier release. (3) The latest release of 4.3 from IBM contains 3 (!) C compilers, all of which are somehow fundamentally brain-damaged. Fortunately, for any piece of software I have found, at least one of them seems to work. I'd much rather have a single C compiler that can be trusted to work properly. (Why hasn't someone ported the AIX C compiler to 4.3? Surely it wouldn't be hard to change the codegen for the 4.3 function calling convention; what else would be required? Of course, then there would be 4 C compilers...) >To a first approximation, this is just not acceptable, especially >considering that the competition seems able to get all these things to >work. My feeling about the RT 4.3 is that despite the above limitations, it is the least brain-damaged UNIX derivative we have here at UT. That doesn't mean that it's the best-maintained or most up-to-date, but the serious bugs seem to get fixed between releases. I wish I could say the same for SunOS. >This is not just grousing because we don't want something new. It >means that we can seamlessly interoperate with a diverse set of >platforms. It also means that the thousands of man years that have >been put into the development of BSD unix are available to us. I agree; this is a major win. I've tried several SysV-ish boxes with "BSD emulation", and the porting effort for non-trivial applications is always several times that of porting an application from one BSD to another. One of the best things about 4.3 is that it's very compatible with vanilla BSD, not only at the C source code but also at the shell script level...all of the commands are there. -- Keith Moore UT Computer Science Dept. Internet/CSnet: moore@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu 107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus BITNET: moore@utkvx Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301 Telephone: +1 615 974 0822