8 ms·

Concise, opinionated history of the BSD/SystemV split

140 points by akkartik 12y ago

bodyfour 12y ago
Some inaccuracies in the timeline. Solaris 2 (the sysv one; the BSD SunOS 4 was after-the-fact renamed to Solaris 1) didn't ship until 1993, not the 80s. Also he says that gcc's support for 68k was important but Solaris never ran on that platform -- Sun made the switch from 68k->SPARC a few years before the BSD->sysv change. The wider point is correct, but it isn't limited to just Sun. The decision for many UNIX vendors to charge extra for the C compiler was a big reason that gcc caught needed momentum. If that hadn't happened the whole free *nix history might have been very different.
- reacweb 12y ago
  I remember having switched to gcc in 1992 on SunOS (sparc) because of nasty bugs in cc compiler.
- johnwfinigan 12y ago
  Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1 physical media, and the date on it is 12/92. My goal is to get old GCC running on it, but first I have to get it running at all. My sun4m is a SparcStation 20, so will probably have to find a sun4c or SS10. Note to anyone trying to image old Sun CD-ROMs: anything below Solaris 2.4 (?) is a CD-ROM with a partition table. If you dd out /dev/cdrom on Linux, you may get only the first partition, in ISO9660 format. You will be missing the small UFS boot partitions. There should be one small UFS partition for each supported arch. Seems like using /dev/sr0 on Linux works.
thristian 12y ago
To this day, I still think of Joyent's CTO as Bryan "Girl Kisser" Cantrill.
- feld 12y ago
  And now I will too :-)
  - sokoloff 12y ago
    For those who don't know the reference: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sun.hardware/msg/242387aeaa5b5456 https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sun.hardware/msg/24...
    - feld 12y ago
      it was also linked to in the actual article :-)
- nailer 12y ago
  If you read Dave Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Miller)'s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Miller)'s post that Cantrill responds to (http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html), it's a really well researched critique of Solaris SPARC performance, justifying the existence of a port of the Linux kernel for that platform. Cantrill's job title was 'Solaris Performance', so Sun and Cantrill looked pretty poor by responding with a personal attack.
- wtbob 12y ago
  He's also the guy who's stated that he would fire an employee for using proper English: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun Seems like an utterly charming fellow.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    That's actually worse than his "Kiss a girl" gaffe. Hard to believe anyone thinks this person should be in charge of anything. They seem to lack both professionalism and maturity. Plus they jump to all kinds of wild (frankly bonkers) conclusion just as the result of someone thinking it should be "he" and "she" rather than "they" or "it." > To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates. ... I don't even... I hope he never discovers popular fiction, he might have some kind of mental breakdown with all the "gendered pronouns" (assuming his current state isn't already the result of some kind of mental breakdown).
dalke 12y ago
Also, inaccurate. Consider just this paragraph: > Sun customers responded by using alternatives, and the closest thing to a working freely downloadable compiler was an obscure project called "gcc" from the guy who did one of the three main emacs variants (gosmacs from the maintainer of java, xemacs from the maintainer of netscape, and gnu emacs). The unbundling occurred in 1990. Gcc was hardly obscure. In this USENIX schedule from 1989 ( http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm ) you see Stallman gave a tutorial on "Introduction to the Internals of the Gnu C Compiler". It's unlikely they would consider that for obscure software. Lucid forked emacs, and released lemacs in 1992. (See http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht... .) "The initial authors of Lucid Emacs were Matthieu Devin, Harlan Sexton, and Eric Benson, and the work was later taken over by Jamie Zawinski, who became "Mr. Lucid Emacs" for many releases." Only later was it renamed xemacs. Zawinski writes: "When Lucid went out of business in 1994, and I came to Netscape, I passed the torch for the maintenance of Lucid Emacs to Chuck Thompson (at NCSA) and Ben Wing (at Sun), who renamed it from ``Lucid Emacs'' to ``XEmacs.''" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html ). Hence, 1) it's not true that gcc was effectively obscure in 1990, 2) there was neither lemacs nor xemacs in 1990, only GNU emacs and Gosling emacs, and 3) xemacs wasn't directly from one of the Netscape developers.
- akkartik 12y ago
  Would you happen to have a pointer to confirm the unbundling happened in 1990 rather than 1987? That seems to be the crux of your disagreement. Edit: never mind, between bodyfour's comment on this page and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29#..., it looks like Solaris 2 only came out in 1991. Thanks.
  - dalke 12y ago
    It looks like there were two stages to unbundling. The first was to add a new, better, unbundled compiler, and the second was to remove the base one. These seem to have taken place in 1990 and 1992, respective. Here's a press release dated April 18, 1989: http://simson.net/ref/free_software/compiler_clips.pdf http://simson.net/ref/free_software/compiler_clips.pdf > Sun Offers New Unbundled C Compiler > In addition, Sun introduced a new product, Sun C 1.0 -- its first compiler sold separately from SunOS ... A version of the C compiler will continue to be bundled and supported with SunOS but feature enhancements will be made to to the unbundled version only. Thus, it can't be 1987. I based the 1990 date because of discussions like http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/1990/1002.html http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/1990/1002.htm...: > Thank you for raising the issue of the unbundling of the Sun C compiler (SunExpert, June, p. 8). Based on that 1989 press release, it may be the first unbundled compiler was in 1989, but https://blogs.oracle.com/tatkar/entry/studio_release_names_from_the https://blogs.oracle.com/tatkar/entry/studio_release_names_f... says that 1990 was the year of the "First unbundled rel (from OS)". Then for the second stage, according to Sun Technical Bulletin July 1992 ftp://ftp.math.ethz.ch/hg/pub/doc/stb/stbjul92.ps : > Sun does not plan to “bundle” any compiler with the Solaris 2.0 operating system. The C compiler, which has traditionally been included as part of the Sun operating system, will be sold as a separate unbundled product. That Wikipedia page says Solaris 2 came out on June 1992, not 1991 as you wrote. Digging around some more, http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht... says: > In 1994, Sun and Lucid agreed to rename Lucid Emacs to XEmacs (a name not favorable to either company); the first release called XEmacs was version 19.11. In June 1994, Lucid folded and Jamie quit to work for the newly formed Mosaic Communications Corp., The first version named XEmacs was in September 13, 1994, so still a couple of years after the C compiler was fully unbundled. My three points remain correct, with the replacement of "1991", "1992", and "1993" in the place of "1990."
agumonkey 12y ago
Interesting to see the business side of things at Sun, it's rarely under the spotlight compared to other companies such as Microsoft or Apple.
guelo 12y ago
After his illustrious career driving Sun into the ground Ed Zander proceeded to drive Motorola into the ground. But he's still richer than you.
- xorcist 12y ago
  It's funny because it's true. On all three points!
DanBC 12y ago
> I'd link to the message in google groups, but google crippled their groups search functionality a couple years back so finding the message in their archives even when you know the message id and the exact date is unreasonably difficult these days. I still don't understand why Google made searching the Usenet archive impossible to do. Some important bits of computing history lurk in those archives and Google just has it all boxed up. The future people are going to shake their fists and wonder why all that information is really hard to get to.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Search by group to arrive here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix Search group for "linus posix". On first response, click the 'No really, search for "linus posix" button, to discard the helpful "linux posix" correction. Look at 23 message subjects lines and arrive here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C2oixEP6qQJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C... Perfect? Probably not. Difficult? No.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    That convoluted process works for that single exact message. What if you want to search for the early appearance of some two word phrase on Usenet? This used to be easy. It can't (as far as I can tell) be done now. And that convoluted process is -considering Google has excellent search engine- a fucking stupid mess.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Sorry about the tone, reading it now it doesn't come across well.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
For what it's worth, the same author (Rob Landley) has another opinionated article on the SysV/BSD split which also touches today's OS X and Linux, under the context of init systems: http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014 http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014 An interesting read, if bound to ruffle some feathers.
- tytso 12y ago
  That article clearly omits one of the primary failures of Ubuntu's upstart, which was Canonical's insistence on copyright assignment. This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions, just as Canonical's control-freak nature over being able to re-license free software under a proprietary license doomed many of their other initiatives. (Some Ubuntu partisans would claim this was only a perception issue, but the legal framework they insisted on using gave them the right to do it, and given that they were a commercial company, and given that people saw what happened with Sun after it was taken over by Oracle, it was extremely unlikely more than a handful would have ever given Canonical the benefit of the doubt.)
  - Chlorus 12y ago
    "When Ubuntu failed to convince other distributions to adopt upstart, it launched new questionable initiatives such as the Unity desktop (the classic "microvax" mistake that Microsoft also made with Metro) " What is the 'microvax' mistake? I'm guessing naming your product too similarly to something else?
  - zokier 12y ago
    > This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions Didn't RHEL ship with Upstart?
    - Chlorus 12y ago
      Yes, RHEL6 + derivatives, so I'm a little confused by that statement.
    - 12y ago
stox 12y ago
Important point: AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move. The all-caps reminds me: SUN was an acronym at one point; it stood for Stanford University Network.
101914 12y ago
"... as the project grew beyond a boot sector, he wrapped his assembly as C inlines..." he = Linus Torvalds project = Linux
keithpeter 12y ago
"So [Torvalds] went through the Sun Workstation manuals in the university library and started implementing each system call listed there until he got tired of that and had his system call handler print the call number of the next unhandled call bash tried to make, implemented that, rinse repeat until he had bash working." This seems culture defining somehow. Linux seems to me to be mix and match and the modern BSDs seem to be more planned. Excellent.
chris_wot 12y ago
Funny how he brings up the Bryan Cantrill comment. Many years later, that same guy threatened to fire a guy he didn't even employ for reverting a gender neutral pronoun.

140 points by akkartik 12y ago

Some inaccuracies in the timeline. Solaris 2 (the sysv one; the BSD SunOS 4 was after-the-fact renamed to Solaris 1) didn't ship until 1993, not the 80s. Also he says that gcc's support for 68k was important but Solaris never ran on that platform -- Sun made the switch from 68k->SPARC a few years before the BSD->sysv change. The wider point is correct, but it isn't limited to just Sun. The decision for many UNIX vendors to charge extra for the C compiler was a big reason that gcc caught needed momentum. If that hadn't happened the whole free *nix history might have been very different.

reacweb 12y ago
I remember having switched to gcc in 1992 on SunOS (sparc) because of nasty bugs in cc compiler.
johnwfinigan 12y ago
Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1 physical media, and the date on it is 12/92. My goal is to get old GCC running on it, but first I have to get it running at all. My sun4m is a SparcStation 20, so will probably have to find a sun4c or SS10. Note to anyone trying to image old Sun CD-ROMs: anything below Solaris 2.4 (?) is a CD-ROM with a partition table. If you dd out /dev/cdrom on Linux, you may get only the first partition, in ISO9660 format. You will be missing the small UFS boot partitions. There should be one small UFS partition for each supported arch. Seems like using /dev/sr0 on Linux works.

thristian 12y ago

To this day, I still think of Joyent's CTO as Bryan "Girl Kisser" Cantrill.

feld 12y ago
And now I will too :-)
- sokoloff 12y ago
  For those who don't know the reference: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sun.hardware/msg/242387aeaa5b5456 https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sun.hardware/msg/24...
  - feld 12y ago
    it was also linked to in the actual article :-)
nailer 12y ago
If you read Dave Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Miller)'s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Miller)'s post that Cantrill responds to (http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html), it's a really well researched critique of Solaris SPARC performance, justifying the existence of a port of the Linux kernel for that platform. Cantrill's job title was 'Solaris Performance', so Sun and Cantrill looked pretty poor by responding with a personal attack.
wtbob 12y ago
He's also the guy who's stated that he would fire an employee for using proper English: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun Seems like an utterly charming fellow.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  That's actually worse than his "Kiss a girl" gaffe. Hard to believe anyone thinks this person should be in charge of anything. They seem to lack both professionalism and maturity. Plus they jump to all kinds of wild (frankly bonkers) conclusion just as the result of someone thinking it should be "he" and "she" rather than "they" or "it." > To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates. ... I don't even... I hope he never discovers popular fiction, he might have some kind of mental breakdown with all the "gendered pronouns" (assuming his current state isn't already the result of some kind of mental breakdown).

dalke 12y ago

Also, inaccurate. Consider just this paragraph: > Sun customers responded by using alternatives, and the closest thing to a working freely downloadable compiler was an obscure project called "gcc" from the guy who did one of the three main emacs variants (gosmacs from the maintainer of java, xemacs from the maintainer of netscape, and gnu emacs). The unbundling occurred in 1990. Gcc was hardly obscure. In this USENIX schedule from 1989 ( http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm ) you see Stallman gave a tutorial on "Introduction to the Internals of the Gnu C Compiler". It's unlikely they would consider that for obscure software. Lucid forked emacs, and released lemacs in 1992. (See http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht... .) "The initial authors of Lucid Emacs were Matthieu Devin, Harlan Sexton, and Eric Benson, and the work was later taken over by Jamie Zawinski, who became "Mr. Lucid Emacs" for many releases." Only later was it renamed xemacs. Zawinski writes: "When Lucid went out of business in 1994, and I came to Netscape, I passed the torch for the maintenance of Lucid Emacs to Chuck Thompson (at NCSA) and Ben Wing (at Sun), who renamed it from ``Lucid Emacs'' to ``XEmacs.''" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html ). Hence, 1) it's not true that gcc was effectively obscure in 1990, 2) there was neither lemacs nor xemacs in 1990, only GNU emacs and Gosling emacs, and 3) xemacs wasn't directly from one of the Netscape developers.

akkartik 12y ago
Would you happen to have a pointer to confirm the unbundling happened in 1990 rather than 1987? That seems to be the crux of your disagreement. Edit: never mind, between bodyfour's comment on this page and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29#..., it looks like Solaris 2 only came out in 1991. Thanks.
- dalke 12y ago
  It looks like there were two stages to unbundling. The first was to add a new, better, unbundled compiler, and the second was to remove the base one. These seem to have taken place in 1990 and 1992, respective. Here's a press release dated April 18, 1989: http://simson.net/ref/free_software/compiler_clips.pdf http://simson.net/ref/free_software/compiler_clips.pdf > Sun Offers New Unbundled C Compiler > In addition, Sun introduced a new product, Sun C 1.0 -- its first compiler sold separately from SunOS ... A version of the C compiler will continue to be bundled and supported with SunOS but feature enhancements will be made to to the unbundled version only. Thus, it can't be 1987. I based the 1990 date because of discussions like http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/1990/1002.html http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/1990/1002.htm...: > Thank you for raising the issue of the unbundling of the Sun C compiler (SunExpert, June, p. 8). Based on that 1989 press release, it may be the first unbundled compiler was in 1989, but https://blogs.oracle.com/tatkar/entry/studio_release_names_from_the https://blogs.oracle.com/tatkar/entry/studio_release_names_f... says that 1990 was the year of the "First unbundled rel (from OS)". Then for the second stage, according to Sun Technical Bulletin July 1992 ftp://ftp.math.ethz.ch/hg/pub/doc/stb/stbjul92.ps : > Sun does not plan to “bundle” any compiler with the Solaris 2.0 operating system. The C compiler, which has traditionally been included as part of the Sun operating system, will be sold as a separate unbundled product. That Wikipedia page says Solaris 2 came out on June 1992, not 1991 as you wrote. Digging around some more, http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht... says: > In 1994, Sun and Lucid agreed to rename Lucid Emacs to XEmacs (a name not favorable to either company); the first release called XEmacs was version 19.11. In June 1994, Lucid folded and Jamie quit to work for the newly formed Mosaic Communications Corp., The first version named XEmacs was in September 13, 1994, so still a couple of years after the C compiler was fully unbundled. My three points remain correct, with the replacement of "1991", "1992", and "1993" in the place of "1990."

agumonkey 12y ago

Interesting to see the business side of things at Sun, it's rarely under the spotlight compared to other companies such as Microsoft or Apple.

guelo 12y ago

After his illustrious career driving Sun into the ground Ed Zander proceeded to drive Motorola into the ground. But he's still richer than you.

xorcist 12y ago
It's funny because it's true. On all three points!

DanBC 12y ago

> I'd link to the message in google groups, but google crippled their groups search functionality a couple years back so finding the message in their archives even when you know the message id and the exact date is unreasonably difficult these days. I still don't understand why Google made searching the Usenet archive impossible to do. Some important bits of computing history lurk in those archives and Google just has it all boxed up. The future people are going to shake their fists and wonder why all that information is really hard to get to.

maxerickson 12y ago
Search by group to arrive here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix Search group for "linus posix". On first response, click the 'No really, search for "linus posix" button, to discard the helpful "linux posix" correction. Look at 23 message subjects lines and arrive here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C2oixEP6qQJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C... Perfect? Probably not. Difficult? No.
- DanBC 12y ago
  That convoluted process works for that single exact message. What if you want to search for the early appearance of some two word phrase on Usenet? This used to be easy. It can't (as far as I can tell) be done now. And that convoluted process is -considering Google has excellent search engine- a fucking stupid mess.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Sorry about the tone, reading it now it doesn't come across well.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

For what it's worth, the same author (Rob Landley) has another opinionated article on the SysV/BSD split which also touches today's OS X and Linux, under the context of init systems: http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014 http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014 An interesting read, if bound to ruffle some feathers.

tytso 12y ago
That article clearly omits one of the primary failures of Ubuntu's upstart, which was Canonical's insistence on copyright assignment. This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions, just as Canonical's control-freak nature over being able to re-license free software under a proprietary license doomed many of their other initiatives. (Some Ubuntu partisans would claim this was only a perception issue, but the legal framework they insisted on using gave them the right to do it, and given that they were a commercial company, and given that people saw what happened with Sun after it was taken over by Oracle, it was extremely unlikely more than a handful would have ever given Canonical the benefit of the doubt.)
- Chlorus 12y ago
  "When Ubuntu failed to convince other distributions to adopt upstart, it launched new questionable initiatives such as the Unity desktop (the classic "microvax" mistake that Microsoft also made with Metro) " What is the 'microvax' mistake? I'm guessing naming your product too similarly to something else?
- zokier 12y ago
  > This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions Didn't RHEL ship with Upstart?
  - Chlorus 12y ago
    Yes, RHEL6 + derivatives, so I'm a little confused by that statement.
  - 12y ago

stox 12y ago

Important point: AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move.

cbd1984 12y ago
> AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move. The all-caps reminds me: SUN was an acronym at one point; it stood for Stanford University Network.

101914 12y ago

"... as the project grew beyond a boot sector, he wrapped his assembly as C inlines..." he = Linus Torvalds project = Linux

keithpeter 12y ago

"So [Torvalds] went through the Sun Workstation manuals in the university library and started implementing each system call listed there until he got tired of that and had his system call handler print the call number of the next unhandled call bash tried to make, implemented that, rinse repeat until he had bash working." This seems culture defining somehow. Linux seems to me to be mix and match and the modern BSDs seem to be more planned. Excellent.

chris_wot 12y ago

Funny how he brings up the Bryan Cantrill comment. Many years later, that same guy threatened to fire a guy he didn't even employ for reverting a gender neutral pronoun.