🚀 go-pugleaf

brunner@joyce (Thomas Eric Brunner) writes:
|I'd like to know what other users of the rt as a 4.3 platform have
|collected in the way of unfixed bugs or undesirable features, as well
|as their experience with IBM's support for the current release.


My impression, as a grad student who is not in any way speaking for
the department, is that the (unix) programmers at IBM Palo Alto are
doing a pretty good job, but that somebody higher up couldn't care
less about offering 4.3BSD as a (viable) product and is seeing to it
that anyone who tries to get it and make it work is given a hard time.
This might be totally off base, in which case I apologise for doubting
such a fine company as IBM, but it sure seems that way to me.

(Question for the IBM folks reading this: what is the ratio of AOS
developers to AIX developers?  Ratio of budgets for each group?)

Three general problems: (1) The 6152's malfunction at will; if they
have to deal with an ethernet, for example.  (2) X11R3 doesn't work on
any flavor of RT.  (3) The C compilers IBM ships generate bad code.

To a first approximation, this is just not acceptable, especially
considering that the competition seems able to get all these things to
work.


The desirable features are clear: It is real live 4.3BSD unix, just
like we have on all our other (non IBM) machines.  (If we wanted to
run VM/AIX, we would have bought another 3090, right?)

This is not just grousing because we don't want something new.  It
means that we can seamlessly interoperate with a diverse set of
platforms.  It also means that the thousands of man years that have
been put into the development of BSD unix are available to us.

One small example: we recently installed a modified rwho daemon (a
round of applause for Jeff Forys, from Boulder, for making the
modifications) that supports packet forwarding between networks, and
point to point packet transmission.  Sure, we probably could develop
something similar for AIX, but with BSD it was already done.  And it
was by it's very nature done for all our machines (sun, vax, rt, etc).
-- 
Scott Schwartz		<schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu>