Does anyone still use Multics??

William E. Davidsen Jr davidsen at steinmetz.ge.com
Sat Dec 10 07:04:58 AEST 1988


In article <33003 at think.UUCP> barmar at kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin) writes:
| I don't recall how much the book talks about details of the file
| system implementation, but it was extensively revised in the early
| 70's.  Additionally, at the time the book was written, the ring
| security facility was implemented primarily in software (resulting in
| many unavoidable security holes), and it was later moved into the
| hardware; all the stuff in the book about the gatekeeper routine is
| obsolete.

This has been discussed in arch a bit, and I have to feel that if
someone were going to market an o/s which is already B2 security
certified they would buy the Multics rights and put it on the Intel 386.
Not to get into a CPU war, but the 386 has just the rings of protection
in hardware needed to implement Multics. When I first saw the chip spec
I thought of Multics.

Being able to do the memory mapped file i/o in hardware via segments is
certainly not hard to take, either. Maybe someday we could have home
Multics systems?
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me



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