[SunRescue] 4/470 os's

[Peter Koch]

Hi!

>sunos will feel much faster, but, well, sunos is crap.

Ah, SunOS isn't really THAT bad. The kernel itself is quite
ok after all the years. /usr-land is outdated a lot, but
no one stops you from building gcc, bind, sendmail or X11.
I've done so and i feel quite comfortable with SunOS.
SunOS has some nifty features that help a lot: shared
libraries (ok, the implementation is crappy, but works),
SysV stuff (IPC facilities!) and working implementations
of NFS (V2), YP and RPC.

One thing should be made clear: The ol' SunOS kernel is
highly optimized for the Sun hardware. It is lean (not the
big fat bloaten pig like Solaris and even Linux) and has
most (if not all) system calls you may want.

It does not only feel faster, it runs faster on the old
Sun3 or Sparc (sun4, sun4c) hardware, period. And it runs
MUCH faster than Linux or NetBSD. And it is much more
stable than the free Unices and supports much more of the
VME-Bus hardware (linux supports virtually nothing,
NetBSD has still a lot of problems with many VME-Bus
cards).

Linux and NetBSD are fine for the Workstations like the
Sun 3/60, IPC or SS2. But for the VME crates, they suck
like a vacuum cleaner (for the heavy industry!).

Solaris 2.4 is ok if you have a HUGE amount of memory
(and on some machine you cannot plug enough into it).

Just my $0.02...

Tschuess

Peter