*BSD News Article 12385


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!sgi!igor!jbass
From: jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass)
Subject: Re: 386BSD vs BSDI
Message-ID: <1993Mar5.204926.10567@igor.tamri.com>
Organization: Toshiba America MRI Inc, S. San Francisco, CA.
References: <1n0mgmINNjat@ftp.UU.NET> <1993Mar3.120727.11788@igor.tamri.com> <1n5nhf$k5d@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 93 20:49:26 GMT
Lines: 23

In article <1n5nhf$k5d@agate.berkeley.edu> bostic@toe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic) writes:
>In article <1993Mar3.120727.11788@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:

>USL's purpose in publishing these interface standards was to enable
>vendors to build device drivers, file systems, and other pieces of
>software that would be compatible with many different versions of their
>system.  (Yes, file systems can be portable.  See S. Kleiman's paper
>"Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX".)

>If you don't want to be, for example, device driver compatible with
>other variants of UNIX, your statement is correct.  If you have no
>interest in trying to convince the rest of the world that they should
>rewrite all of their device drivers, the functionality of biowait/iowait
>is fixed, and cannot be changed.

yes a UNIX interfaced IS published ... for SVR4 ... which is very
different than V7/32V .... this doesn't allow UCB/BSD to retroactively
apply the interface back to an older product where the interface is NOT
published. Had UCB/CSRG upgraded their code to a SVR4 interface this
would be a completely different argument.

John Bass
DMS Design