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HP retort

The longest in-use SysV UNIX today is ... HP-UX. In order to understand it, one needs to be free of Solaris bigotry. HP-UX and Solaris have 2 separate strategies - both at the kernel level and at the "OS application" level.

HP tries to run "everything" though the kernel. This makes for a good speed boost - as the layers of context switching in software is reduced. HP computers were ALWAYS 25% faster than their Sun counterparts. This came at a cost though. As an example - Sun would write the NFS reference code and Solaris was always up to the latest and greatest. HP would need to re-write to code to get closer to the kernel. As a result, as Sun was releasing ONC 4.0 (NFSv4), HP was still using ONC 1.2. This illustrates the cost of being 25% faster - being far behind in (software) technology.

At the OS "app" layer, Sun's philosophy was to create all sorts of small "utility" programs to all sorts of things. Sun shunned GUI utility "programs" - their "Admintool" being quite a joke. Sun Bigots made fun of HP for things like SAM and Software Distributor - why use a big GUI when all you have to do is run this little utility and that little utility? This is best illustrated by HP's IgniteUX and Sun's Jumpstart. IgniteUX is a full-featured (GUI) platform for installing the OS - while Jumpstart was an ugly concentration of scripts haphazardly thrown into a directory structure.

On the whole, HP-UX was always rock solid - even when Solaris was in its infancy and failing badly (the first 4 Solaris versions were non-usable).

Not that I love HP-UX and hate Solaris, I like them both. I just don't like when Sun Bigots discount any other OS than Solaris. There are many things I don't like about HP-UX (/sbin/rc0.d) - I need to write that blog on UNIX forking!

The one area that HP lost badly to Sun was support. Sun support was always supurb - while HP was fair to bad. I (personally) changed that at Ford to where HP was on-par with Sun - just before Ford sold its soul to big blue . . .

I'm sorry that you never understood HP-UX Murph, in my heyday I could make it sing . . .

Posted by: Roger Ramjet   Posted on: 04/25/09  (Edited: 04/25/2009 @ 01:43) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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