Rumours about "new" U*IX ?

[Jim Gettys]

In article <7179 at tekgen.BV.TEK.COM> mike at raven.uss.tek.com (Mike Ewan) writes:
>In article <7177.278f2835 at abo.fi> hege at abo.fi writes:
>>A few months ago there was an ad in misc.jobs.offered (I think) where
>>Digital looked for people to develop a U*IX that was supposed to be
>>"The U*IX of the 90's". In Digital Review (was it December 10, 1990?)
>>the editor in chief rumoured something about U*IX/OSF-version from
>>DEC within 6 months. Does anybody have any information about this?
>
>(This is all from memory, I don't have the article in front of me.)
>In "Insight" a few months ago there was an article by the Ultrix product
>manager about the directions of Ultrix.  He stated that with the next
>major release (5.0?) Ultrix will be completely OSF/1 with the Mach
>distributed processing kernel.  He also said that they are putting a
>lot of effort into making the whole thing look and work the same as
>it does now.  What I gather from the article and experience, the 5.0
>release should be around the middle of this year or maybe fall.
>Any comments from DEC folks out there?

Folks are certainly working on it (hard).  Thankfully, not me :-).
(I gave at the X bloodbank).  As to when, I think the only 
statement to date has been "1991", i.e. sometime this year.

And given experience here at CRL with earlier snapshots, OSF/1 can indeed 
provide Ultrix compatibility, so one's existing code runs just fine
barring the ususal exceptions of programs that open /dev/kmem and grovel
through kernel data structures that have traditionally broken between
releases (though OSF/1 provides clean interfaces to kernel data structures,
that should even reduce this problem in the future.).
We certainly ran large piles of exiting executable we have here on it last
spring and summer (like lots of DECwindows application, etc.), and were quite 
pleased.
				Jim Gettys
				Digital Equipment Corporation
				Cambridge Research Lab.


--
Digital Equipment Corporation
Cambridge Research Laboratory