9 Aug
2019
9 Aug
'19
7:46 a.m.
On 8/7/19 7:04 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
FWIW: V7 had /stand which was a funky UNIX-like
standalone system that
some applications could be compiled.
I've seen /stand on a few systems (I think SCO OpenServer and / or
UnixWare) but never really knew what it was for. I think I had naively
assumed it was associated with the kernel and / or booting.
Now I'm somewhat more curious what it was. Was it a simplified version
of the OS with minimal utilities with fewer dependencies so that the
system could boot and load more features.
I thought that Linux's initramfs / initrd had the usual suspect files /
utilities copied from /. So the idea that a utility in /stand would be
different from the same utility in / seems strange to me.
The problem was that it was a little different so you
would end up
seeing #ifdef STAND in code for things like fsck, fsdb, even cat.
At Masscomp we ended up with three target environments for a couple of
the system maintenance utilities: the OS, /stand and the boot ROMS.
This was expensive/a PITA to maintain and keep straight, and in the
case of the boot ROM, space was a huge problem.
Ya. I can see how that would be a PITA to maintain.
The RAMFS idea was created to get rid of at least
/stand and IIRC we
were able to drop a number of utilities out of the boot ROM. I'm not
sure how far they took it. I left for Stellar and it was always the
way Stellix booted.
ACK
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die