From: Nick Hilliard (nick at domain iol.ie)
Date: Wed 17 May 2000 - 17:31:10 IST
Kate wrote:
> On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 10:50:14AM +0100, Paul Jakma mentioned:
> > > > The BSDs and related (DU, SunOS4) OTOH don't seem to.
> > > Most likely because they don't have the concept of "Runlevels" ?
> > Sure? (any *BSD afficionados out there?) Digital Unix at least has
> > runlevels, (though no rc.d/rc?.d/ symlinks dirs afair) and it has a strong
> > BSD heritage.
Digital Unix (or OSF/1, or Tru64, or whatever it's called this week) is a
mixture of SVR4 + BSD + work done by the OSF people. The runlevels idea was
snitched from SVR4.
> Well, perhaps recently they've aquired it. But runlevels was one of the
> things that made RedHat a BSD/SysV hybrid
Errrr, what? RedHat is as much BSD as Solaris is, except that it uses
bsd-style "ps" and a few other utilities by default. Neither RedHat nor any
other form of Linux are even remotely a BSD hybrid.
> - 4.4 didn't have it, I'm about
> 95% sure.
BSD doesn't have runlevels - never did. It has two run modes: multiuser and
single user. Single-user just means that init spawns /bin/sh instead of
/etc/rc at bootup, and to the best of my knowledge, booting up in single
user mode has been possible for ever. This is not the same as runlevels.
[warning: tongue-in-cheek religious opinion below]
> don't know why people are always so down on SysV Unicen. They aren't all
> that bad. OK, they tend to be a bit slow in the kernel dept. (eg IRIX 5 vs
> IRIX 6), but apart from that imle they're really solid, and the scripts
> are nicely laid out..
The scripts aren't really that well-written. If you take /etc/init.d, for
example, how much code is just duplicated between scripts? What do you do
if you want to modify a bootup parameter or something? Edit the script and
hope that it works on the next bootup? Compare that with the FreeBSD idea
of /etc/rc.conf, or even better, use a mixtures of init.d scripts and
rc.conf. Sysconfig in Linux is unwieldy; there are too many files and too
much messing around.
All of the unix varients are improving, though.
> Yes, SCO actually have a nice Unix!
Read: "I have lost my mind and am a raving lunatic. Please ignore me".
Just kidding, but SCO _is_ inelegant.
> The worst Unix IMO is Solaris. It's supposed to be a SySV, but it's the
> most 'unique' unix i've come across. It has loads of solaris'isms that
> just make it a pain to work on if you don't know it.[1]
A good operating system is an operating system which (among other things)
does well what it claims to do well. Solaris does many things well, even if
the layout is sometimes a little impenetrable.
Nick
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