[geeks] Daily Dose of Unix

[Frank Van Damme]

On Friday 31 January 2003 21:37, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> 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

Honestly... no :-)

I know that it is on my unix timeline, glued to the wall but that's about it 
:-) 

> 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, ...

That's pretty neat. 

> 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.

I haven't heard much good from gcc for non-x86 platforms. 

> 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

...unlike xfs, which is the main reason I don't use this filesystem yet :-(

> / 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.

Wow... pretty cool...

Someday I'll get hold of an alpha box, sgi is first in the row though ;)

With Tram. And a quake3 port, lol :-)



-- 
Frank Van Damme
http://www.openstandaarden.be