Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Why unix doesn't catch on
Message-ID: <8259@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 21 Apr 89 16:43:42 GMT
References: <7632@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <256@jwt.UUCP> <13573@ncoast.ORG>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 26

In article <13573@ncoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:

>The key words being "DOS Merge".  I have a 2MB AT386 with Oracle on it in my
>apartment at the moment (borrowed from the office); it runs fine.  If I want
>to use DOS, I'll use my own machine.  And with more DOS programs coming out
>for use under native Unix all the time, VP/ix or DOS-Merge looks less and
>less interesting all the time.  (It has a 60MB RLL drive, if you care.)  But
>it takes 4MB to run OS/2 plus SQL Server, from what I hear.

Yes, DOS merge is CPU intensive.  Here is what ps say about it: VP/ix on
an AT&T 6386 (done on April 18 so CPU time is for 5 days of mostly sitting
at a DOS ">" prompt in a background virtual terminal).

     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME COMMAND
    root     1     0  0  Apr 10  ?        4:04 /etc/init 
    root     3     0  0  Apr 10  ?       50:17 bdflush
     les  3663  3662 20  Apr 13  vt05    7347:16 dos 
[ other reasonable things deleted..]

Sar always reports 0 idle time when a dos process is running - even
without a dos program running.  It doesn't seem to affect unix performance
as badly as you would expect from this, though.  It would be a useful
product if it provided a real netbios interface to allow multiple sessions
to cooperate.

Les Mikesell