UNIX for 286-based systems

[Shawn Bosley]

In article <540 at gould9.UUCP> joel at gould9.UUCP (Joel West) writes:
>I'm still collating info for UNIX on a xxx86 machine (and would note
>that I got a (postal) mailing from IBM in Austin about Xenix 2.0, based
>solely on a previous posting.)
>
>I've narrowed myself to a 286-based system, probably a $3-$4k clone.
>I definitely will be buying something that is still bundled, true
>to the UNIX ideal.  I have two quick questions:
>
>1.  Which UNIX or XENIX take advantage of the protected mode?  (presumably 
>    to prevent a misbehaving task from crashing the whole cpu).
IBM's XENIX (version 2.0) is derived from UNIX SYSTEM V and has everything
you need to work well in UNIX. Version 1.0 had some horrible problems
with it (I had to suffer through most of them) but version 2.0 seems to have
cleared up the limitations (they should have never released version 1.0!)
XENIX runs is the protected mode so that it would be very difficult to
crash the system. I would recommend XENIX because it has good support and
I haven't had too many problems porting code from other UNIX systems
over to it.
>
>2.  Does the 286 chip still have that awful segmentation small model
>    vs. large model crap?  Or, are there 286 instructions which make
>    it possible to address > 64kb contiguously?  If so, does the
>    C compiler for #1 support this?
>
Unfortunately, I doubt that you could elimnate this problem because
of the inherent design of the 286 chip. However, XENIX offers 
small, medium, and large models for C programs. It's really not too
inconvenient in the sense that you *know* what model is necessary
to do the job.
>Any 286 *NIX benchmarks against a VAX would also be interesting...
>-- 
>	Joel West	 	(619) 457-9681
>	CACI, Inc. Federal, 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct., La Jolla, CA  92037
>	{cbosgd, ihnp4, sdcsvax, ucla-cs} !gould9!joel
>	joel%gould9.uucp at NOSC.ARPA

--Shawn Bosley