[geeks] Daily Dose of Unix

[Jochen Kunz]

On 2003.01.31 13:11 Frank Van Damme wrote:

> How is true64?
Very BSDish. ;-)
My main workstation is an Alpha PWS 500au running Tru64 5.1. Tru64 calls
itself a SysV UNIX, but if you look closer you will find a MACH
microkernel with a lot of BSD on top. (remember Ultrix?) The kernel
config file will look very familar when you know how a (Free) BSD kernel
config file looks like. The disk partition lable is called "disklabel",
"ps awx" works like expected... Most things are done in a very "unixish"
way, not like e.g. AIX with its binary config databases. (I don't say
that AIX is bad because of that. The AIX way is not the usual "Unix
way". Thats all.) There is a lot of the usual Free/GNU ware part of the
system. perl, tcl/tk (The graphical installer is written in tcl/tk),
cyrus-imapd, ...
A ANSI C compiler is part of the base system. This compiler generates
much better code than GCC (2.x). I have seen the difference when
comparing the 500au to an other 500 MHz EV56 Alpha running NetBSD. No
detaild benchmarking, the Tru64 applications feel just faster when using
e.g. gv / Ghostscript. You have to pay extra $$$ for debugger etc. and
the C++ compiler.
A main advantage is the speed and flexibility of the Advanced File
System, AdvFS. AdvFS is jornaled / log structured (not only metadata is
jornaled, even user data can be jornaled upon request), you can grow and
_shrink_ file systems, you can spreed file systems across multiple disks
/ volumes, you can migrate file systems from one disk / volume to an
other disk / volume. All this can/must be done with the file system
mounted R/W. You can take snapshoots to get consistent backups, ... All
this are functions of AdvFS, no logical volume manager (LSM) is
involved. But you can use LSM in addition.
--



tsch|_,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/