cjcox
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2004
- Messages
- 2,947
I know some of all this and maybe it's a necessity too to use a newer flavor as well. I got an OK feel for UNIX with CentOS and with other UNIX forks and Linux distros, but UNIX is and was the grand daddy of them all and if it's the grand daddy then Multics must be the god or whatever, even if neither one of the originals should ever be used anymore though and if they haven't been studied probably should to bring them up to code if necessary. I don't like proprietary that is why I stay away from it or try to. I prefer inlel, even if I shouldn't.
I regards to how many UNIX ports you've helped ported that is amazing considering the complexity of the code that must be faced.
Biggest problem had to do with the compiler. In the early days of Unix, a full C compiler came with it. In particular it was used so that the kernel could be rebuilt with your own tuning parameters and possibly additional drivers and such. But then, they stopped shipping a compiler, or they shipped a low level compiler that could just be used for tuning options only. The problem was that the include files for many things were not provided. So you often had to create your for things normally found in /usr/include or include/sys. So it was a mixture of dealing with the variations of includes out there (because each vendor was also including their own as they were not supplied with the base) and creating ones that didn't exist. That was by far the the biggest issue in porting. The rest was BSD vs SysV-isms. Many of those SVR distros included BSD-isms with their own modifications. Some of the mods were smart, but just different. For example, it was nice to see shared objects in HP-UX. But it wasn't anywhere else. AIX had there own old style (extended) coff style jump table library mechanism (which had its own quirks, some interesting, some garbage). Signal handling varied. BSD style, SysV style, and of course AIX style (which was actually severely broken up to vers 3.something or maybe 4).
I don't really understand why there is no need for UNIX anymore or why I was so fascinated by it except now know how powerful it's code is and how it helped shape modern UNIX's and UNIX-Like OS as well as others.
I know Linux is the like UNIX with a major upgrade because it is the healthiest continuation of UNIX in existence, but I'm just facinated by it, even though I don't want to be a code to have to do anything that complex I hope and it's a good thing I can borrow the code and hopefully it's reliable considering how old it is.
Oh, Linux is a different beast, not Unix. As "maddog" and I like to say, "Unix is a Linux-like OS". It's weird, the things that make Unix so wonderful, some of the elements are present in other OS's, but without the easy of reach to the end user (not sure why that is). IMHO, the shell (Bourne shell+) and the filtering command set are the most valuable features of a Unix system.
I mean, it's nice that Windows has Powershell, but even so, you just can't do half as much with Windows as you can with Linux (or even Unix).
As an "old" Unix guy, I"m very pleased that we have Linux. Unix is "reliable", but embarassingly poor code. Lots of bad stuff to make the kernel difficult to port (lots of 3b2 isms, SysV wise). Sadly, there was a lot of pride back then, and nobody really wanted to make something so free as to change the world back then (even BSD).