brent@itm.UUCP (Brent) (04/22/85)
X
Well Saturday we spent our first real day under Xelos. All in
all, it looks pretty good. The major change is the IOCTL calls,
which we still haven't worked with enough to figure out entirely.
We did figure out how to go into cbreak mode.
The shell has a lot of stuff built in, like pwd and test. As
a result, it's pretty snappy. pwd is instant. Consequently, it's
gotten big - 93K.
Awk now appears to handle floating point numbers right, though
I didn't try formatted printing. And yes, automatic arrays work
now, too: it didn't dump core when I printed them out. A plug
for awk - if your shell scripts don't use awk, they should. Awk
is the Swiss Army Knife of the Unix toolbox. Useful for everything.
Wierdness - you can't say "login someonelse" now. You have to
say "exec login someonelse". A bit strange.
Cron and at have each gotten strange and wonderous. Each user
can now have his own crontab, with the resulting processes each
"suid"ed to that user. Sorta neat, but harder to keep track of what's
going on when since they're not all in the same file now. At(1) now
can work from up to 26 cues. Strange and wonderous.
Someone went wild on the system accounting stuff. You can
now bill yourself for anything. System billing units are called
"widgets". Cute.
The nice-try-but-no-cigars award goes to the -O option of
cc. Yes, there is now an object optimizer for C. We compiled
our local screen editor without the -O option: 92056 bytes.
With the -O option 94042 bytes. That's right. -O saved a whole
12 bytes!!. Nice try.
Dump under Edition 7 takes about 20 min/tape. We tried
volcopy. Really fast - 10 minutes per tape. We dumped the
entire /usr partition to tape (25 Meg) using only 0:49 of
cpu time. Like I said - really fast. But it does appear to be
more fussy than dump about tape write errors. Tape that worked
fine under dump raised a lot of write errors under volcopy.
We'll try it next with cpio.
Film at 11,
Brent Laminack (pesnta!itm!brent)