tin@smsc.sony.com (Tin Le (Tin Man)) (01/31/91)
At Uniforum '91 in Dallas, I tried to visit as many vendors as I had
the time who claimed to have S5R4 running. This is mainly because
I am involved in the QA part of our S5R4, and wish to see how others
fared. Having gone through the problems myself of QA S5R4, finding
and confirming the bugs, and try to fix it if I could, I know how
much work it was/is.
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, I just happen to work for
Sony. They don't tell me what to say and I do the same.
This is just a general impression of what I encountered. Note that
I didn't (couldn't) spend a lot of time on each system to really do
the justice.
The most important thing I noticed was that everyone seems to have
the same bugs.
GENERAL
- lots of bugs in the general utilities
. seems to be caused by the fact the integration
of FFS into Sys5 is not complete. Many of the utils
are still aren't aware of the fs they are on (14 chars
limit in S5 vs 255 in FFS).
- UFS still has bugs
- many bugs in the BSD emulation area, both utilities and
libraries (readdir: filesystem).
NOTE: My impression is that AT&T and most vendors don't
seem to pay much attention to this area (BSD emulation).
A lot of the bugs are fairly trivial/easy to fix. I pointed
out a simple one to one of the guy and he didn't even know
how the command is supposed to work in BSD.
- numerous bugs in the man page area
- bugs in the wtmp/wtmpx/utmp/utmpx
- plenty of bugs in the network/STREAMS. Hint: try ftp.
SPECIFIC
Systems I tried:
UHC: seems to work (with above bugs), at least didn't panic.
Price is too high for me.
ESIX: they are still in alpha/beta test. Kinda working. I
saw X11R4 running. All the above bugs and more.
Microport: same as UHC, don't know about price though.
Dell: same as UHC. Plus of having lots of PD utils plus
GNU stuffs.
Commodore/Amiga: Works quite well. About same performance
as a 386/25 (w/o cache). Great/fast graphics though.
All the bugs listed above, except their man pages
don't have as many problems.
--
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