seth@megad.UUCP (Seth H Zirin) (07/23/85)
> I am looking at various fault tolerant vendors and am starting > to look seriously at STRATUS. I was wondering if anyone out there > in net-land has had any experience with any of the STRATUS/32 family > or with their IBM clone the System 88? > (...!ihnp4!rruxo!johno ) I consult for a firm "K" that intends to use a medium sized Stratus for a large fault-tolerant transaction network. "K" originally was using an Auragen computer, but Auragen is now defunct. Although "K" won't have the Stratus in house for a few more days, I've been able to use the demo machine in the NY sales office for testing and code development. > 1) How "standard" their version of "C" is The Stratus version of "C" seems to be fairly standard, with some inclusions such as "char varying", that make it a little PL/1ish. The argc/argv argument passing mechanism doesn't work when "C" programs are run under VOS, but does work when using USF. In addition, the "C" compiler acts very much like a PL/1 compiler with its "SEVERITY LEVEL" type error messages that are stored in a file.error rather than sent to stderr. It seems cumbersome and uncomfortable for someone familiar with unix. > 2) How close their VOS/USF (Virtual Operating System/ UNIX > System Facility) is in reality to AT&T UNIX system V. My impression (from hands on use) of the USF facility is that it is a PL/1 USER-PROGRAM (called sh) that is simply a command-line interpreter that translates keystrokes into VOS calls. A number of facilities like "ps", "adb", "who", and "kill" are sorely absent. Its very slow, "ls -l" of a directory with 5 things takes very near a minute. The /dev directory is empty, but programs can open /dev/null and /dev/tty, making me wonder where the kludge is. Finally, if a user-written program hangs or bombs, it takes that user's "kernel" with it. I think the USF facility is nothing more than a foot in the door :-(. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Name: Seth H Zirin UUCP: {decvax, ihnp4}!philabs!sbcs!megad!seth Keeper of the News for megad