[PLUG] SunOS vs Solaris version numbers.

Anthony Schlemmer aschlemm at attbi.com
Thu Aug 15 19:20:02 UTC 2002


Having been in the situation where I had to support code that ran under 
Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, and IRIX, I felt it easier to maintain the code 
since all platforms supported System V signals and IPC mechanisms. It 
made it a bit easier to maintain the code so it ran correctly under all 
four environments. I don't want to think about what it would have been 
like to support both System V and BSD in the same code. Maybe it could 
be done in less work than what my insticts are telling me.

There were a number of subtle differences among the various Unix systems 
where the Unix APIs were concerned. I recall differences where on one 
systems structs were created from the heap while on other systems a 
struct was static and would be reused if the function that created it 
is was called again. 

With good documentation and man pages I found it possible to have code 
that ran on all of the systems and the things that were diffent used 
#ifdefs and liberal use of comments explaining why something was being 
done differently for one OS compared to another, etc.

Tony

On Thursday 15 August 2002 12:25 pm, Steve Beattie wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 11:21:48AM -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Anthony Schlemmer wrote:
> > > Screams could also be heard from the users that had enjoyed very
> > > stable systems under the BSD derived SunOS as well. My wife was
> > > working for Sprint at the time Solaris rolled out and they had a
> > > number of system crashes under early versions of Solaris. It was
> > > a painful transition to say the least.
> >
> > Yeah, I've heard the same. I wasn't doing SunOS work back then, but
> > one fellow colleague told me that it took a loooonnngg time for him
> > to accept the BSD -> SysV transition. I'm sure that was as true
> > within the Solaris engineering group at Sun as it was for SunOS
> > users.
>
> The rumor that I've heard is that Sun wanted SunOS to scale more to
> multiple processor systems, but when they looked at the
> re-architecting that needed to be done to the BSD kernel to support
> multi-processors and saw that most of that work had already been done
> in the SysV kernel, they decided that it'd be quicker/less effort to
> adopt SysV. That FreeBSD is the only BSD just now starting to support
> SMP (AFAIK, but I don't follow the BSDs that closely), while Solaris
> scales well to 16 or more processors (or so I've been led to believe)
> gives some credence to that rumor, but it very well could be a
> complete and utter figment of my imagination.

-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com
>>>>This machine was last rebooted:  17 days 23:27 hours ago<<






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