40 years of Unix (BBC) [LWN.net]

40 years of Unix (BBC)

Posted Aug 25, 2009 2:59 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: 40 years of Unix (BBC) by Wol
Parent article: 40 years of Unix (BBC)

Is anyone working on any of the above features for Linux?

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40 years of Unix (BBC)

Posted Aug 25, 2009 21:51 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, MAC and ACLs are getting implemented, slowly, with things like SELinux.

Single-level storage would require fundamental changes in Unix such that it wouldn't be Unix anymore, although this feature does live on in IBM mainframe products (the 'i' and 'z' series, I believe).

Memory-mapped IPC would be possible, I'd think, if processes were able to mmap eachother's executable space and have a linker that could do the binding to the exposed functions on the fly. I don't see why that couldn't be done in a backwards-compatible manner. I also don't know of anyone trying to do it.

40 years of Unix (BBC)

Posted Aug 27, 2009 22:47 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

Single-level storage would require fundamental changes in Unix such that it wouldn't be Unix anymore, although this feature does live on in IBM mainframe products (the 'i' and 'z' series, I believe).

System I (called Eserver I series from 2001 to 2005, and a bunch of other things before that) does, but the System Z operating systems are about as far as you can get from it.

"mainframe" isn't a very meaningful word these days, but to most people it simply means IBM System Z. Nobody uses the word for System I.

40 years of Unix (BBC)

Posted Aug 28, 2009 2:59 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

Thanks for correction.

I said that because I had read an article by an IBM shill about SLS in IBM products. They *were* speaking specifically about the I-series but kept making statements about how "IBM mainframe users just expect this sort of feature" so I assumed it was more widespread. :<