Seeking a Development Environment (Sun?)

[Mark Weiser]

In article <4956 at brl-smoke.ARPA> hi-csc!giebelhaus at umn-cs.arpa (Timothy R. Giebelhaus) writes:
>
>>Not nearly as different as Domain/IX is from ANY Unix machine.
>>I keep hearing people say that Apollo has Unix.
>>
>>They don't. It is an emulation.
>
>As was said by paul at umix.uucp and Nathaniel Mishkin, Apollo's UNIX is
>not an emulation.  Apollo has a non standard kernel and so does Sun.
>I hold that if DOMAIN/IX is an emulation, SunOS is an emulation.
>
>Giebelhaus at hi-multics.arpa
>ihnp4!umn-cs!hi-csc!giebelhaus

There are several other comments throughout Timothy's message
similar to the above.  But there is a difference between being a
little non-standard and wildly totally different.  The biggest
difference in the Sun kernel is in the windowing system device
driver, and associated kernel code.  Outside this realm, things
are pretty normal right down to the #ifdef VAX's.  Things are
standard enough inside the Sun kernel that I can take interesting
kernel hacks, like SLIP, and just about drop them in (modulo Sun's
silly bugs in their ioctl code).  A student of mine even took the
entire 4.3 networking code, XNS and all, and fitted it into the
Sun 2.0 release.  It more or less dropped in.  The sun kernel is
sufficiently standard that one can benefit from net bug reports,
code postings, and general unix expertise in people.  This is a
TREMENDOUS advantage.  I believe that a large part of Unix's success
is that it was open and available for people to play with, learn
from, try porting to other machines, build community around.  There
is no such community around Aegis internals, except within Apollo.
-mark
-- 
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	mark at maryland	Phone: +1-301-454-7817
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USPS: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742