*BSD News Article 84341


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From: Paul David Fox <pfox@lehman.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Solaris 2.6
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 15:06:11 +0000
Organization: Lehman Brothers, Inc.
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Casper H.S. Dik wrote:
> I'm not sure if truss is changed that much; what has changed is /proc,
> instead of just one file, it's now exploded into little files &
> directories (binary files), pretty much like the original
> /proc design documents said it should have been/.

Can you elaborate on what that enables us to do from the command
level. I know, for instance Linux has a full blown
directory hierarchy in /proc and its useful for some things.
But my personal interest is things like truss (and /usr/proc/bin which
is nearly undocumented. Took me 6 months to realise it was there!)

E.g. can we officially do this:

	truss -lX11 <cmd>

(I have my own version of truss which can do this, and it'd be
nice to see if someone else has come up with something better).


By the way, can you officially or unofficially say why these /proc
extensions were done? Is it to be as good as the competition, bash
the competition, someone at Sun internally wanted it bad, so it got
done, some customer wanted it? I'm just curious as to why these
little icings get done, when the bureaucracy at Sun can only think
in terms of that terrible 'J' word.
 
> >I personally think Solaris 2.5 is one of the best Unixes out there
> >from a feature (s/w debugging) standpoint. Performance sucks _real_
> >bad, but I can live with that. I just want to know what to look forward
> >to in terms of new tracing tools.
> 
> I'm not sure if I can agree on the performance bit.  With the side by
> side comparison of Linux/SunOS 4/Solaris 2.5 someone did showed that
> Solaris 2.5 was generally faster to much faster than SunOS 4.x.
> (Solaris 2.x is also penalized in the process exec times because it
> links *all* code, including "hello.c" with -lsocket -lnsl; -lnsl
> drags in four more libraries so the penalty is stiff)

I appreciate that but theres something more going on than this.
My compilation times are abysmal and its not the shlib stuff that is
the cause.
 
> >Also any approx idea of the 2.6 release schedule?
> 
> I cannot possibly comment on that.

Ok, lets try again! 1997 or 1998?
 
> >Oh and one other thing, can anyone at Sun explain why 2.5 and 2.5.1
> >exist at all for the x86 platform? Why isnt 2.5 just dropped and
> >provide a patch upgrade from 2.5 to 2.5.1.
> 
> I suppose we'd reeally want everybody to run the latest release, but
> since we can't force people to do so, we need to support older releases.
> But even if Solaris 2.5/x86 was EOLed *now*, we'd still have contractual
> obligations to make patches and such.

I dont understand this. 2.5 vs 2.5.1 must imply a small difference
in functionality/performance. If the difference is large, then one
must ask why was 2.5 released and immediately followed by 2.5.1?
If the diffs are that good then why not call it 2.6?

To me, 2.5.1 sounds like a minor upgrade to 2.5. Were the changes
that drastic? 

In my opinion, 2.5. was fine except it looks like Sun ballsed up
and released something that wasnt high on the quality control. So
2.5.1 came into existing to fix those issues. But then Sun went
on about all that WEB server performance hype. Oh well, thats
company politics for you.
 
> Casper

I enjoy reading your comments because there seems to be very few
people left at Sun who talk on the net and talk in 'Programmer-speak'
instead of the market drivel.

Keep up the good P/R.

-- 
Paul David Fox		Lehman Brothers.
Everything I say	E-mail:	pfox@lehman.com
is at the mercy 	Home: fox@crisp.demon.co.uk
of my fingers.  	Tel: +44 171 601 0011 x6397