*BSD News Article 83713


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From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: Solaris 2.6
Date: 27 Nov 1996 16:27:51 GMT
Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden
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  <57fipg$q7j@panix2.panix.com> <casper.329c06bc@mail.fwi.uva.nl>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik) wrote:

> >There are commercial operating systems based on 4.4BSD.  In fact, the last
> >time I looked, despite Sun's touting itself a bigtime player in the 
> >Internet/intranet server market, it was _losing_ market share there to
> >4.4-based systems, although of course everyone loses market share to Linux,
> >too.
> 
> There was no installed 4.3 BSD base worth mention on hardware now supported
> on 4.4 BSD.   There never was a big transition requireing serious binary
> compatibility.

That's not right.  The Net-2 code was 4.3BSD (at least wrt. off_t).
There has been quite a reasonable userbase using NetBSD 0.something,
FreeBSD 1.something, or the commercial BSD/OS 1.something.  All of
them had to migrate to the 4.4BSD-based system with their next major
OS release.  Be assured, all of them had old binaries around by that
time (and probably also old libraries, though i don't frankly remember
any other problems than the already mentioned fcntl() desaster).

I think the commercial BSD/OS was the easier case however, since their
version 1 systems didn't have shared libs.

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de       http://www.interface-business.de/~j