Re: Introduction
Peter da Silva (peter@nmti.com)
Wed, 7 Feb 1996 15:48:01 -0600 (CST)
> Care to substantiate the above claim? Actually, my conscience might
> feel a bit clearer afterward, if you were to simply skim
> http://www.oac.uci.edu/~strombrg/why-solaris.html, and call it a day...
* Solaris is *not* a System V environment, and it's *not* a BSD environment.
Porting SunOS software to Solaris is harder than porting it to Digital UNIX,
which is little-endian and 64-bits wide!
Given this, and given how much faster the Alpha is than the Sparc, why would
you even bother messing with Solaris? If you're going to go through a heavy
conversion effort anyway, you might as well take the opportunity to get rid
of the register window cruft in the Sparc architecture and switch to something
that'll still be giving decent performance in the next century.
Digital UNIX is based on 4.3 Reno. Most of the 4.4 enhancements to the O/S
actually made it into Reno, according to Kirk McKusick and Mike Karels. It's
close enough that Avalon took the 4.4-lite code and put it on top of their
capability-based distributed microkernel to let it run OSF/1 binaries. It's
about the cleanest commercial UNIX out there today... I find it much less
stressful than any of the System-V based systems.