dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer) (03/12/89)
In article <1581@eneevax.UUCP> jsrobin@eneevax.eng.umd.edu (John S. Robinson) writes: > In each case it usually took several days and many call backs, but in > the end I was able to determine that only SCO would 'claim' that they > supported the 82385 cache controller. I suspect that this is one of the > prime reasons that it is taking SCO so dreadfully long to get there > upgrade to Sys V 3.2 shipped, long after everyone else is shipping > product. The only reason I can imagine why SCO isn't shipping UNIX V 3.2 yet is because they have to provide an environment which is compatible with their earlier releases. Microport (rip?), Interactive and AT&T could essentially start from a "blank slate" of 386 customers or those who are already familiar with System V.3 on other architectures. SCO cares enough to worry about all its customers running its earlier releases who will be adding new machines and upgrading older ones. UNIX V/386 3.2 out of the box just won't hack it alone--binary compatibility is only a small part of keeping an operation running which already has staff trained on the way SCO XENIX has been administered and has been used. Their 2.3 release is a transitional move towards complete integration. The stuff about "programming around" the cache controller in the other flavors of UNIX sounds pretty spurious to me. I would be VERY surprised if CPU-bound programs compiled on either a XENIX 386 box or a 386/ix box or an AT&T 3.2 box (choose one) showed different execution times on identical machines with cache (with only the OS differing.) Sounds easy to test, though. -- Steve Dyer dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer dyer@arktouros.mit.edu