Request for vendors of SYS V Ports for PC/AT Compatibles

Bill Northlich billn at normac.UUCP
Fri Feb 14 03:00:12 AEST 1986


>	Santa Cruz Operation releases XENIX System V.  It is a
>good port of Sys. V with extra goodies and the support isn't bad.
>					Dennis J. Doherty

Agree that it is a good job.  Disagree that it is system V. (yea!).  Eg,
it has a "normal" compiling system, not the bletcherous COFF.
"Nm" produces names and numbers, not the amazing stuff of svr2.  Adb is
there and works.  The cc produces excellent code for small and middle
modle, and sorta works for large and huge modle.  Long id's.  Lots of reasonable
options on the cc, eg, produce 286 code, produce 187 code, produce DOS 
object files and/or use DOS libraries, etc.  The assembler ("masm" or
"Microsoft macro assembler") seems to have all the widgets ever
thought of for assemblers, though I prefer UNIX-style assemblers. Uucp works(!).
Easy to re-configure, install, add new drivers to.  1k buffers.  Single-user
performance not bad, compares favorably with most micro and some "super"-micro
68k systems I have used, though it really boggs down with several processes
running at once.  Lots of useful docco (arranged, as seems to be the fashion,
somewhat strangely).

"Bad" things: Shl is not there (at least on the one I have).  (who cares?).
For porting user code and/or drivers, some of the includes are not sys v.
Several semi-obsucre peices of the manuals are not correct, eg, the
cc man page says -S produces an assembly output which won't assemble(!).
This used to be the not very useful case, but is fixed now.  Be warned:  for
programs with large numbers of symbols, one must use the -LARGE flag to the
cc (invokes large-modle version of the cc).  Depending on your configuration,
the -LARGE cc may not run with less than 640k of memory installed.  No ^Z; so
called Berkeley enhancements merely include a few random user programs such
as vi, csh (no pushd-popd), and finger.

/b



More information about the Comp.unix mailing list