[TUHS] AIX moved into maintainance mode

[TUHS] AIX moved into maintainance mode

[arnold]

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/

FYI.

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Phil Budne]

On the "Unix(TM) is dead" premise:
Isn't Apple (Mac) OS still certified?

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

shows OS 13

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Phil,

> On the "Unix(TM) is dead" premise:
> Isn't Apple (Mac) OS still certified?
>
> https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
> shows OS 13

The fine article ends with

   ‘Which means that the last officially trademarked commercial UNIX™ is
    Apple's macOS 13, which underneath the proprietary GUI layer is mostly
    an open source OS called Darwin anyway.  The kernel, XNU, is based on
    Mach with an in-kernel "Unix server" derived from FreeBSD...’
	— https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 15:56, Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
>
> The fine article ends with

*Heh*

>    ‘Which means that the last officially trademarked commercial UNIX™ is
>     Apple's macOS 13, which underneath the proprietary GUI layer is mostly
>     an open source OS called Darwin anyway.  The kernel, XNU, is based on
>     Mach with an in-kernel "Unix server" derived from FreeBSD...’
>         — https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/

Indeed it does. I wrote it. Thanks to Arnold for posting it.

I am getting some grief on Twitter too for "omitting" FreeBSD. I
didn't, but the BSDs don't fit either definition of "Unix". The
pre-1993 one being "based on AT&T code" -- after all, BSD (4.4 Lite r2
was it? Before my time!) -- went to a lot of effort to eliminate AT&T
code. The post-'93 definition, after Novell donated the trademark to
the Open Group, is "passed Open Group testing". Nobody has the time or
the inclination to pay, and indeed, why should they?

I hope to return to the subject of the BSDs in general on the Reg in future.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 7:44 AM Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 15:56, Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>
> wrote:
> >
> > The fine article ends with
>
> *Heh*
>
> >    ‘Which means that the last officially trademarked commercial UNIX™ is
> >     Apple's macOS 13, which underneath the proprietary GUI layer is
> mostly
> >     an open source OS called Darwin anyway.  The kernel, XNU, is based on
> >     Mach with an in-kernel "Unix server" derived from FreeBSD...’
> >         — https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>
> Indeed it does. I wrote it. Thanks to Arnold for posting it.
>
> I am getting some grief on Twitter too for "omitting" FreeBSD. I
> didn't, but the BSDs don't fit either definition of "Unix". The
> pre-1993 one being "based on AT&T code" -- after all, BSD (4.4 Lite r2
> was it? Before my time!) -- went to a lot of effort to eliminate AT&T
> code. The post-'93 definition, after Novell donated the trademark to
> the Open Group, is "passed Open Group testing". Nobody has the time or
> the inclination to pay, and indeed, why should they?
>

Yes. I think I tweeted that all the BSDs are derived from Unix. This is
very true: V7 was ported to the VAX by AT&T which produced 32V (which had a
lot of different versions, but Berkeley started with an early one, before
V7 was officially released). Berkeley added demand paging to it to create
3BSD, 4BSD, etc. While much of the original AT&T code was re-written, it
was replaced with functionally equivalent code so the system behaved the
same before / after the rewrite. In many cases the rewrite was an
improvement, in some it wasn't. More importantly, though, it retained much
of the structure of the original AT&T code, especailly in the kernel. So if
you understood the BSD code, you'd understand the System V code and vice
versa at least at a gross level. Ditto all the commercial Unixes which
also, btw, rewrote a substantial portion of the original AT&T code. All the
BSDs is derived from Unix, but can't use the Unix trademark... There have
been people that have run the compliance suite over the years against the
different BSD, producing patches that fixed issues (though the last one I
recall was in the early 2000s). But since nobody paid for official
certification, nobody knows how close things are thees days.

A similar level of rewrite and restructuring has happened to Linux over the
years. Outside of drivers, very little remains even from the 2.x days of
Linux, let alone the 1.x or 0.x lines. It too has been rewritten from
having strong assumptions about running on a single CPU to scaling to
thousands of CPUs these days. A similar evolution has happened in the BSDs,
though with different paths taken in the different forks.


> I hope to return to the subject of the BSDs in general on the Reg in
> future.
>

That would be cool...

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 16:03, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> More importantly, though, it retained much of the structure of the original AT&T code, especailly in the kernel. So if you understood the BSD code, you'd understand the System V code and vice versa at least at a gross level.

I believe I was in the audience for your FOSDEM talk on this matter. :-)

>> I hope to return to the subject of the BSDs in general on the Reg in future.
>
> That would be cool...

FWIW, in the last year, I've reviewed FreeBSD, OpenBSD (twice), NetBSD
and DragonflyBSD.

The Dragonfly team contacted me and owned the problems I had. They
don't test against VirtualBox.

For the others, various admirers complained in the comments, or by
email, or by social media, or combinations thereof, and nobody but
nobody went "oh, you're right, that _is_ a problem, we should look at
that."

There's an ongoing "spirited discussion" ;-) on Twitter right now with
me, Frank Leonhardt, and Eugene Markow.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[arnold]

Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
was crazy, but he was right.

arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>
> FYI.
>
> Arnold

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
to free.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
> was crazy, but he was right.
> 
> arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> >
> > FYI.
> >
> > Arnold

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.

Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:


> It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> to free.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> > was crazy, but he was right.
> > 
> > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > 
> > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > 
> > > FYI.
> > > 
> > > Arnold
> 
> 
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Stuff Received]

On 2023-01-18 11:10, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
 > Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three
 > save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I
 > guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...

There is a fairly lively debate in the comments section on this and 
other matters.

N.

 >
 > - Matt G.
 >
------- Original Message -------
Reference to https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.

It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
Linux seem like the future.

As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it 
hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> 
> Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> 
> - Matt G.
> 
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > to free.
> > 
> > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > 
> > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > > 
> > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > 
> > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > > 
> > > > FYI.
> > > > 
> > > > Arnold
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Maintenance mode on AIX

[Ron Natalie]

The thread with a similar name reminds me of this story.    My little 
company did a lot of special work for IBM (Federal Sector) from putting 
a second network card into Secure XENIX to porting the 370/PS2 AIX to 
two i860 cards.

Occassionally, we’d get random other IBM hardware dropped on us.   One 
day an RS/6000 showed up.   The problem was that they didn’t give us any 
indication what the logins were (let alone the root password).   Being 
the long time security “investigator” that I was I started poking around 
at the thing while waiting for IBM to call me back.    The thing had a 
key switch that switched you from power OFF to NORMAL ot a WRENCH icon 
(maintenance mode).    So I powered it up in the wrench mode.   The 
thing booted up Unix but rather than a shell gave some maintenance 
program.    I poked around at the options hoping for something that 
would be useful for me without luck.   One option was to view the 
documentation so I brought that up and it displayed some text.    The 
neat thing (for me) was that it used ‘more’ to paginate it.   Sure 
enough, when I got to the end of the first page, I could just hit ! at 
the prompt and get a root shell.    It was then pretty easy to get the 
machine set up to our liking.

-Ron

[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:27:50PM +0000, Ron Natalie wrote:
> Occassionally, we???d get random other IBM hardware dropped on us.   One day
> an RS/6000 showed up.   The problem was that they didn???t give us any
> indication what the logins were (let alone the root password).   Being the
> long time security ???investigator??? that I was I started poking around at
> the thing while waiting for IBM to call me back.    The thing had a key
> switch that switched you from power OFF to NORMAL ot a WRENCH icon
> (maintenance mode).    So I powered it up in the wrench mode.   The thing
> booted up Unix but rather than a shell gave some maintenance program.    I
> poked around at the options hoping for something that would be useful for me
> without luck.   One option was to view the documentation so I brought that
> up and it displayed some text.    The neat thing (for me) was that it used
> ???more??? to paginate it.   Sure enough, when I got to the end of the first
> page, I could just hit ! at the prompt and get a root shell.    It was then
> pretty easy to get the machine set up to our liking.

Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
would get root.  That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
on it, you can get in.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
> would get root.  That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
> pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
> a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
> on it, you can get in.
>
A reasonable point, but I think it really depends on the UNIX implementation
I suspect.  Current mac OS is pretty well hardened from this, with their
current enclaves and needing to boot home to Apple to get keys if things
are not 100% right. Not saying you or I can not, but basically means the
same cracking tricks you need to use for iPhones. It's not as easy as you
describe.

The ubiquitous Internet/WiFi changed the rules - as you can start to keep
some set of keys somewhere else and then encrypt the local volumes.   In
fact, one of the things they do if mac OS boot detects that root has been
modified (it has a crypto index stored away when it was made read-only),
the boot rolls back to the last root snapshot -- since they are all
read-only that works.   In fact, it is a PITA to update/fix things like
traditional scripts (for instance the scripts in the /etc/periodic area).
 Basically, they make it really unnatural to change the root files system,
make a new snapshot and index (I have yet to see it documented although,
with much pain, I previously created a procedure that is close -- i.e. it
once worked on my pre-Ventura Mac - but currently -- fails, so I need to
some more investigation when I can bring this back to the top of the
importance/curiosity stack (I have a less than satisfying end around for
now so I'm ignoring doing it properly).

Clem
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[segaloco via TUHS]

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Apple's unreasonable hardening has been the latest deterent to my ever wanting to use macOS as a personal driver. I've got a Mac as my daily driver for work, it can happily stay with work until I can decide how the filesystem is laid out and what folders I, as the root user, can and can't interact with from user land. I own my machine, not Apple.

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 8:59 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
>> would get root. That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
>> pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
>> a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
>> on it, you can get in.
>
> A reasonable point, but I think it really depends on the UNIX implementation I suspect. Current mac OS is pretty well hardened from this, with their current enclaves and needing to boot home to Apple to get keys if things are not 100% right. Not saying you or I can not, but basically means the same cracking tricks you need to use for iPhones. It's not as easy as you describe.
>
> The ubiquitous Internet/WiFi changed the rules - as you can start to keep some set of keys somewhere else and then encrypt the local volumes. In fact, one of the things they do if mac OS boot detects that root has been modified (it has a crypto index stored away when it was made read-only), the boot rolls back to the last root snapshot -- since they are all read-only that works. In fact, it is a PITA to update/fix things like traditional scripts (for instance the scripts in the /etc/periodic area). Basically, they make it really unnatural to change the root files system, make a new snapshot and index (I have yet to see it documented although, with much pain, I previously created a procedure that is close -- i.e. it once worked on my pre-Ventura Mac - but currently -- fails, so I need to some more investigation when I can bring this back to the top of the importance/curiosity stack (I have a less than satisfying end around for now so I'm ignoring doing it properly).
>
> Clem
> ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[Will Senn]

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Wow, we're all over the place on this thread. I stopped updating my Mac 
with Mojave. Occasionally, I flirt with more recent incarnations and 
much like with recent Windows incarnations, I scurry back pretty quickly 
to the stable and fast. ... and Mojave support 32 bit apps, which is 
nice. It's fast, responsive, and locked down the way I like it.

The mutually exclusive goals represented by security/it lockdown 
obsession and OS phone homeitis is ridiculous. One hopes that this is 
not a permanent set of affairs. I would prefer my OS to be under my 
control and secure my information, for me.

Lately, I've been doing work with SculptOS on Genode - a capabilities 
based OS running on a microkernel (trusted computing base). Sculpts got 
a ways to go, but I like the way the architects are thinking.

Will


On 1/18/23 11:08 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> Apple's unreasonable hardening has been the latest deterent to my ever 
> wanting to use macOS as a personal driver.  I've got a Mac as my daily 
> driver for work, it can happily stay with work until I can decide how 
> the filesystem is laid out and what folders I, as the root user, can 
> and can't interact with from user land. I own my machine, not Apple.
>
> - Matt G.
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 8:59 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>>     Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix
>>     box, they
>>     would get root. That has been true forever and it's even more
>>     true today,
>>     pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in
>>     there or add
>>     a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put
>>     your hands
>>     on it, you can get in.
>>
>> A reasonable point, but I think it really depends on the UNIX 
>> implementation I suspect. Current mac OS is pretty well hardened from 
>> this, with their current enclaves and needing to boot home to Apple 
>> to get keys if things are not 100% right. Not saying you or I can 
>> not, but basically means the same cracking tricks you need to use for 
>> iPhones. It's not as easy as you describe.
>>
>> The ubiquitous Internet/WiFi changed the rules - as you can start to 
>> keep some set of keys somewhere else and then encrypt the local 
>> volumes. In fact, one of the things they do if mac OS boot detects 
>> that root has been modified (it has a crypto index stored away when 
>> it was made read-only), the boot rolls back to the last root snapshot 
>> -- since they are all read-only that works. In fact, it is a PITA to 
>> update/fix things like traditional scripts (for instance the scripts 
>> in the /etc/periodic area). Basically, they make it really unnatural 
>> to change the root files system, make a new snapshot and index (I 
>> have yet to see it documented although, with much pain, I previously 
>> created a procedure that is close -- i.e. it once worked on my 
>> pre-Ventura Mac - but currently -- fails, so I need to some more 
>> investigation when I can bring this back to the top of the 
>> importance/curiosity stack (I have a less than satisfying end around 
>> for now so I'm ignoring doing it properly).
>>
>> Clem
>> ᐧ
>

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[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[David Barto]

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I think that the situation with MacOS is an (over) reaction to viruses, worms, and the end users themselves.
In order to make sure that the normal user doesn’t do something silly to their system Apple has wound up restricting what the more advanced and knowledgeable user can do.

I’m in an in-between camp. I like to install what I want and as long as I can do that, MacOS will work for me. And I like that Apple is working to stop the “bad guys” as much as possible.

When installing what I want stops happening then I’ll stop upgrading. Until then I’m willing to ride the Apple train.

	David

> On Jan 18, 2023, at 9:21 AM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Wow, we're all over the place on this thread. I stopped updating my Mac with Mojave. Occasionally, I flirt with more recent incarnations and much like with recent Windows incarnations, I scurry back pretty quickly to the stable and fast. ... and Mojave support 32 bit apps, which is nice. It's fast, responsive, and locked down the way I like it.
> 
> The mutually exclusive goals represented by security/it lockdown obsession and OS phone homeitis is ridiculous. One hopes that this is not a permanent set of affairs. I would prefer my OS to be under my control and secure my information, for me. 
> 
> Lately, I've been doing work with SculptOS on Genode - a capabilities based OS running on a microkernel (trusted computing       base). Sculpts got a ways to go, but I like the way the architects are thinking.
> 
> Will
> 
> 
> On 1/18/23 11:08 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
>> Apple's unreasonable hardening has been the latest deterent to my ever wanting to use macOS as a personal driver.  I've got a Mac as my daily driver for work, it can happily stay with work until I can decide how the filesystem is laid out and what folders I, as the root user, can and can't interact with from user land. I own my machine, not Apple.
>> 
>> - Matt G.
>> ------- Original Message -------
>> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 8:59 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> <mailto:clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
>>> Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
>>> would get root. That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
>>> pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
>>> a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
>>> on it, you can get in.
>>> A reasonable point, but I think it really depends on the UNIX implementation I suspect. Current mac OS is pretty well hardened from this, with their current enclaves and needing to boot home to Apple to get keys if things are not 100% right. Not saying you or I can not, but basically means the same cracking tricks you need to use for iPhones. It's not as easy as you describe.
>>> 
>>> The ubiquitous Internet/WiFi changed the rules - as you can start to keep some set of keys somewhere else and then encrypt the local volumes. In fact, one of the things they do if mac OS boot detects that root has been modified (it has a crypto index stored away when it was made read-only), the boot rolls back to the last root snapshot -- since they are all read-only that works. In fact, it is a PITA to update/fix things like traditional scripts (for instance the scripts in the /etc/periodic area). Basically, they make it really unnatural to change the root files system, make a new snapshot and index (I have yet to see it documented although, with much pain, I previously created a procedure that is close -- i.e. it once worked on my pre-Ventura Mac - but currently -- fails, so I need to some more investigation when I can bring this back to the top of the importance/curiosity stack (I have a less than satisfying end around for now so I'm ignoring doing it properly).
>>> 
>>> Clem
>>> ᐧ
>> 
> 


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[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 18:22, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wow, we're all over the place on this thread.

True!

> I stopped updating my Mac with Mojave.

Me too. I have some irreplaceable 32-bit apps.

> I would prefer my OS to be under my control and secure my information, for me.

I agree.

*But* the thing is this, and I am theorizing here.

Apple is trying to move to Arm-ISA Macs with its own very highly
integrated chipset. This is imposing some issues.

E.g. The M1 Macs can't boot from an external device if the internal
one fails. You can't just put in a USB key and start from it. You
can't just remove a failed drive, replace it, format it, reinstall the
OS and keep going.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/437022/can-apple-silicon-based-mac-boot-from-unauthorized-external-drive

They seem to lack the old 68K/PowerPC/x86 fairly clean separation
between firmware and OS on a disk.

They are, pretty much, the whole computer on a single SOC.

The first SOC was the ARM250: CPU + GPU + memory controller.

Then FPU and bus controllers and interfaces and things moved on board too.

Now, the RAM is on board, and the SSD is also built in if not on the
same die. It is extremely hard to replace/upgrade them, e.g.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgrades-possible/

In a way the Arm Macs are sort of like iPads with external screens. It
is also notable that there is _still_ no Arm-based Mac Pro: I don't
think they've found a way to make their new architecture as modular,
with external GPUs and an expansion bus. I suspect they won't be able
to and eventually the Intel kit will quietly disappear with no direct
replacement.

So I think that Apple is trying to make the OS as *extremely* robust
and tamper-proof as they can, because if that soldered-in-place disk
gets scrambled or compromised, then the expensive hardware is
basically toast.

I don't like it either and I don't want an Arm-powered Mac for now...
but I sort of understand what they are trying to do, I think.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[Arno Griffioen via TUHS]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:38:40AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
> would get root.  That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
> pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
> a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
> on it, you can get in.

Until a few years ago, I would definitely agree. Done that regularly
in the past. (and worked on lots of network gear too...)

However..

Nowadays with a little effort you can make a bootable Linux machine that 
uses either a passphrase or some external key/dongle/fingerprint/etc.
to unlock an encrypted root fs and additional filesystems.

If you don't have those credentials, then it's going to be pretty tricky to 
access as you simply can't even access any of the encrypted filesystems to 
start with.

Yes, you could probably get the initrd booted with a root shell and
then wipe the machine/disk to then do what you want, but the original
install is getting pretty hard to jump into with boot tricks these days.

								Bye, Arno.

[TUHS] Re: Maintenance mode on AIX

[Brad Spencer]

Arno Griffioen via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:38:40AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
>> would get root.  That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
>> pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
>> a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
>> on it, you can get in.
>
> Until a few years ago, I would definitely agree. Done that regularly
> in the past. (and worked on lots of network gear too...)
>
> However..
>
> Nowadays with a little effort you can make a bootable Linux machine that 
> uses either a passphrase or some external key/dongle/fingerprint/etc.
> to unlock an encrypted root fs and additional filesystems.
>
> If you don't have those credentials, then it's going to be pretty tricky to 
> access as you simply can't even access any of the encrypted filesystems to 
> start with.
>
> Yes, you could probably get the initrd booted with a root shell and
> then wipe the machine/disk to then do what you want, but the original
> install is getting pretty hard to jump into with boot tricks these days.
>
> 								Bye, Arno.


Yes++ ...  I did something simular with NetBSD a few years ago.  I
booted a removable drive that asked for the passphrase to decrypt the
real root filesystem..  the drive was removed and stored separately from
the laptop when at rest.  Today, I don't even need a removable drive any
more, a ramdisk is attached to the kernel and unpacks itself upon boot
and that asks for the passphrase.  The root filesystem itself is more or
less completely encrypted.  Not quite full end to end, but very close.
All you could really do is destroy the system, which may be good enough
for some, but getting the information off of the encrypted filesystem
would be hard.



-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Will Senn]

Hi Larry,

I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really 
a fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As 
a line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it 
works, much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple 
flavors). That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is 
the future bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a 
couple of days ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of 
course it was CORE, try that with SCALE :).

It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just 
cuz they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say 
this as I gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.

Will

On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
>
> It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
> Linux seem like the future.
>
> As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
>> I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
>>
>> Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
>>
>> - Matt G.
>>
>> ------- Original Message -------
>> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
>>> to free.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
>>>> in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
>>>> This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
>>>> was crazy, but he was right.
>>>>
>>>> arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>>>>>
>>>>> FYI.
>>>>>
>>>>> Arnold
>>>
>>> --
>>> ---
>>> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

Wishful thinking.  An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts.  It
was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
developers.  Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.

They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
dead in that very few people use them.

Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> Hi Larry,
> 
> I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
> fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
> line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
> much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
> That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
> bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
> ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
> CORE, try that with SCALE :).
> 
> It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
> they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
> gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
> 
> Will
> 
> On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> >kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> >
> >It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
> >Linux seem like the future.
> >
> >As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> >the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> >hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
> >
> >On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> >>I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> >>
> >>Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> >>
> >>- Matt G.
> >>
> >>------- Original Message -------
> >>On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> >>>to free.
> >>>
> >>>On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> >>>>in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> >>>>This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> >>>>was crazy, but he was right.
> >>>>
> >>>>arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> >>>>>
> >>>>>FYI.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>Arnold
> >>>
> >>>--
> >>>---
> >>>Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Will Senn]

Pretty sure Netflix CDN is still using it as are other vendors in need 
of stable and fast. Just cuz my neighbor doesn't use it, or joe website 
hoster doesn't use it doesn't relegate it to the nobody uses it pile.

On 1/18/23 10:42 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Wishful thinking.  An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
> The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts.  It
> was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
> developers.  Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
> of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.
>
> They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
> dead in that very few people use them.
>
> Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
> desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
>> Hi Larry,
>>
>> I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
>> fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
>> line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
>> much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
>> That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
>> bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
>> ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
>> CORE, try that with SCALE :).
>>
>> It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
>> they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
>> gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
>>
>> Will
>>
>> On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
>>> kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
>>>
>>> It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
>>> Linux seem like the future.
>>>
>>> As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
>>> the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
>>> hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
>>>> I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
>>>>
>>>> Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
>>>>
>>>> - Matt G.
>>>>
>>>> ------- Original Message -------
>>>> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
>>>>> to free.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
>>>>>> in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
>>>>>> This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
>>>>>> was crazy, but he was right.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> FYI.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Arnold
>>>>> --
>>>>> ---
>>>>> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

Well if you want to use your precious time working on some BSD, by all
means, it's your time.  I looked at where the BSDs were going 30 years ago
and decided that helping Linux would be a better return on investment.
I don't say that happily, SunOS was my happy place and it was the best
BSD that ever existed.  Turning to Linux was not easy but history has
shown it to have been the right choice for me.

The problem with BSD is a lack of users.  Linux has so many more people
using it, the chances of one of them finding the problem and getting it
fixed, before I hit it, are dramatically higher than the same thing with
a BSD release.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:57:17AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> Pretty sure Netflix CDN is still using it as are other vendors in need of
> stable and fast. Just cuz my neighbor doesn't use it, or joe website hoster
> doesn't use it doesn't relegate it to the nobody uses it pile.
> 
> On 1/18/23 10:42 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >Wishful thinking.  An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
> >The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts.  It
> >was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
> >developers.  Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
> >of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.
> >
> >They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
> >dead in that very few people use them.
> >
> >Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
> >desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.
> >
> >On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> >>Hi Larry,
> >>
> >>I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
> >>fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
> >>line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
> >>much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
> >>That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
> >>bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
> >>ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
> >>CORE, try that with SCALE :).
> >>
> >>It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
> >>they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
> >>gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
> >>
> >>Will
> >>
> >>On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >>>Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> >>>kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> >>>
> >>>It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
> >>>Linux seem like the future.
> >>>
> >>>As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> >>>the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> >>>hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
> >>>
> >>>On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> >>>>I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> >>>>
> >>>>Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> >>>>
> >>>>- Matt G.
> >>>>
> >>>>------- Original Message -------
> >>>>On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>>It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> >>>>>to free.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> >>>>>>in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> >>>>>>This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> >>>>>>was crazy, but he was right.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>>https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>FYI.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>Arnold
> >>>>>--
> >>>>>---
> >>>>>Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Will Senn]

Fair enough, but the worlds a little more forgiving than all that doom 
and gloom :). If an innovation happens in BSDland, it generally gets 
ported into Linuxland, in time, and visa versa. I heart linux, don't get 
me wrong. I just wish they would...


On 1/18/23 11:16 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Well if you want to use your precious time working on some BSD, by all
> means, it's your time.  I looked at where the BSDs were going 30 years ago
> and decided that helping Linux would be a better return on investment.
> I don't say that happily, SunOS was my happy place and it was the best
> BSD that ever existed.  Turning to Linux was not easy but history has
> shown it to have been the right choice for me.
>
> The problem with BSD is a lack of users.  Linux has so many more people
> using it, the chances of one of them finding the problem and getting it
> fixed, before I hit it, are dramatically higher than the same thing with
> a BSD release.
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:57:17AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
>> Pretty sure Netflix CDN is still using it as are other vendors in need of
>> stable and fast. Just cuz my neighbor doesn't use it, or joe website hoster
>> doesn't use it doesn't relegate it to the nobody uses it pile.
>>
>> On 1/18/23 10:42 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> Wishful thinking.  An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
>>> The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts.  It
>>> was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
>>> developers.  Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
>>> of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.
>>>
>>> They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
>>> dead in that very few people use them.
>>>
>>> Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
>>> desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
>>>> Hi Larry,
>>>>
>>>> I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
>>>> fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
>>>> line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
>>>> much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
>>>> That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
>>>> bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
>>>> ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
>>>> CORE, try that with SCALE :).
>>>>
>>>> It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
>>>> they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
>>>> gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
>>>>
>>>> Will
>>>>
>>>> On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>>>> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
>>>>> kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS.  Windows, MacOS, and
>>>>> Linux seem like the future.
>>>>>
>>>>> As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
>>>>> the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
>>>>> hasn't changed.  That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
>>>>>> I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> - Matt G.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ------- Original Message -------
>>>>>> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
>>>>>>> to free.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
>>>>>>>> in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
>>>>>>>> This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
>>>>>>>> was crazy, but he was right.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> FYI.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Arnold
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> ---
>>>>>>> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

Something I think would do wonders for UNIX diversity (although I obviously haven't done a feasibility analysis) is a convergence or at least some sort of homogenization of driver interfaces.  That is one of the key areas where I think faster movement would have me using BSDs exclusively, but at any given time I can't expect the same hardware support from anything other than the Linux kernel.  I'm not in the know on current driver interfaces to know if its apples to apples, apples to oranges, or apples to hypercubes.  But still, if *BSD supported the BCM2711 in entirety w/ graphics accel and onboard SDIO-driven wifi, Linux would serve me no advantage at present other than I know how to tune the kernel build a lot better.

Granted, driver support is not only implicated here, I'd be a lot more nomadic with operating systems if I knew I could work on hobby projects across the preponderance of them efficiently.

At the end of the day I just want a system with a POSIX-friendly kernel that works with all my devices and doesn't have a complicated userland.  As of present, GNU/Linux w/ sysvinit is the happy medium, although one of these days I mean to research in earnest if there's a BSD/V7-ish init that actually gels well with Linux+Glibc userspace.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 9:25 AM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:


> Fair enough, but the worlds a little more forgiving than all that doom
> and gloom :). If an innovation happens in BSDland, it generally gets
> ported into Linuxland, in time, and visa versa. I heart linux, don't get
> me wrong. I just wish they would...
> 
> 
> On 1/18/23 11:16 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> > Well if you want to use your precious time working on some BSD, by all
> > means, it's your time. I looked at where the BSDs were going 30 years ago
> > and decided that helping Linux would be a better return on investment.
> > I don't say that happily, SunOS was my happy place and it was the best
> > BSD that ever existed. Turning to Linux was not easy but history has
> > shown it to have been the right choice for me.
> > 
> > The problem with BSD is a lack of users. Linux has so many more people
> > using it, the chances of one of them finding the problem and getting it
> > fixed, before I hit it, are dramatically higher than the same thing with
> > a BSD release.
> > 
> > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:57:17AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> > 
> > > Pretty sure Netflix CDN is still using it as are other vendors in need of
> > > stable and fast. Just cuz my neighbor doesn't use it, or joe website hoster
> > > doesn't use it doesn't relegate it to the nobody uses it pile.
> > > 
> > > On 1/18/23 10:42 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Wishful thinking. An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
> > > > The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts. It
> > > > was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
> > > > developers. Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
> > > > of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.
> > > > 
> > > > They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
> > > > dead in that very few people use them.
> > > > 
> > > > Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
> > > > desktop users is around 1%. BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.
> > > > 
> > > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > Hi Larry,
> > > > > 
> > > > > I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
> > > > > fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
> > > > > line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
> > > > > much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
> > > > > That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
> > > > > bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
> > > > > ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
> > > > > CORE, try that with SCALE :).
> > > > > 
> > > > > It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
> > > > > they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
> > > > > gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Will
> > > > > 
> > > > > On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > > Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> > > > > > kernel dev. Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS. Windows, MacOS, and
> > > > > > Linux seem like the future.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> > > > > > the lack of someone like Linus. That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> > > > > > hasn't changed. That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > > I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on. Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD. That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > - Matt G.
> > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > ------- Original Message -------
> > > > > > > On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy lm@mcvoy.com wrote:
> > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > > > > > > > to free.
> > > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > > > > > > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > > > > > > > This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> > > > > > > > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > > > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > > > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > > > FYI.
> > > > > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > > > Arnold
> > > > > > > > > > --
> > > > > > > > > > ---
> > > > > > > > > > Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Kevin Bowling]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 2:10 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> Something I think would do wonders for UNIX diversity (although I obviously haven't done a feasibility analysis) is a convergence or at least some sort of homogenization of driver interfaces.  That is one of the key areas where I think faster movement would have me using BSDs exclusively, but at any given time I can't expect the same hardware support from anything other than the Linux kernel.  I'm not in the know on current driver interfaces to know if its apples to apples, apples to oranges, or apples to hypercubes.  But still, if *BSD supported the BCM2711 in entirety w/ graphics accel and onboard SDIO-driven wifi, Linux would serve me no advantage at present other than I know how to tune the kernel build a lot better.

http://www.projectudi.org/ was a nod to cross-platform drivers that
seemed to go nowhere fast.  Linux and FreeBSD also had some limited
form of NDIS (Windows network driver model) for some time.

One thing you realize after doing a little driver work is most
companies have no comprehension of driver quality supporting or
harming revenue and reputation.  Most purchasers are happy with some
value of "works" and performance is hopefully within target, anything
else is entropy.  A lot of historic poor experiences with WinNT-based
OS are driver issues, Microsoft eventually got pretty serious about
this and the situation is not as bad these days.  Occasionally someone
gets it right by dead reckoning, Nvidia won GPU and ML because their
(proprietary) drivers are less awful than everything else in the
space.

> Granted, driver support is not only implicated here, I'd be a lot more nomadic with operating systems if I knew I could work on hobby projects across the preponderance of them efficiently.
>
> At the end of the day I just want a system with a POSIX-friendly kernel that works with all my devices and doesn't have a complicated userland.  As of present, GNU/Linux w/ sysvinit is the happy medium, although one of these days I mean to research in earnest if there's a BSD/V7-ish init that actually gels well with Linux+Glibc userspace.
>
> - Matt G.
>
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 9:25 AM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Fair enough, but the worlds a little more forgiving than all that doom
> > and gloom :). If an innovation happens in BSDland, it generally gets
> > ported into Linuxland, in time, and visa versa. I heart linux, don't get
> > me wrong. I just wish they would...
> >
> >
> > On 1/18/23 11:16 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >
> > > Well if you want to use your precious time working on some BSD, by all
> > > means, it's your time. I looked at where the BSDs were going 30 years ago
> > > and decided that helping Linux would be a better return on investment.
> > > I don't say that happily, SunOS was my happy place and it was the best
> > > BSD that ever existed. Turning to Linux was not easy but history has
> > > shown it to have been the right choice for me.
> > >
> > > The problem with BSD is a lack of users. Linux has so many more people
> > > using it, the chances of one of them finding the problem and getting it
> > > fixed, before I hit it, are dramatically higher than the same thing with
> > > a BSD release.
> > >
> > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:57:17AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> > >
> > > > Pretty sure Netflix CDN is still using it as are other vendors in need of
> > > > stable and fast. Just cuz my neighbor doesn't use it, or joe website hoster
> > > > doesn't use it doesn't relegate it to the nobody uses it pile.
> > > >
> > > > On 1/18/23 10:42 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Wishful thinking. An OS needs critical mass in terms of developers.
> > > > > The BSD efforts divided their devs by having multiple efforts. It
> > > > > was very obvious from the beginning that Linux was getting all the
> > > > > developers. Go look at the rate of commits to Linux vs the rate
> > > > > of commits to {Net,Open,Free,DragonFly,etc}BSD.
> > > > >
> > > > > They aren't dead as in nobody does anything to them but they are
> > > > > dead in that very few people use them.
> > > > >
> > > > > Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
> > > > > desktop users is around 1%. BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.
> > > > >
> > > > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:36:48AM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Hi Larry,
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I disagree, but only time will tell. I don't think BSD is dead is really a
> > > > > > fair statement, unless you're referring to the actual distribution. As a
> > > > > > line, I think it's still viable (I run it in several flavors and it works,
> > > > > > much more reliably than most linuxes which I also run in multiple flavors).
> > > > > > That said, everybody :) it seems, seems to be on the Linux is the future
> > > > > > bandwagon with seemingly only a few of us holdouts. Just a couple of days
> > > > > > ago I spun up a TrueNAS instance and it was glorious - of course it was
> > > > > > CORE, try that with SCALE :).
> > > > > >
> > > > > > It does seem like the wave favors Windows, Mac, and Linux... But, just cuz
> > > > > > they're popular doesn't mean the less popular OSes are dead (I say this as I
> > > > > > gaze fondly over towards my KIM-1 clone and think of Monitor.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Will
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On 1/18/23 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> > > > > > > kernel dev. Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS. Windows, MacOS, and
> > > > > > > Linux seem like the future.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> > > > > > > the lack of someone like Linus. That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> > > > > > > hasn't changed. That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on. Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD. That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > - Matt G.
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > ------- Original Message -------
> > > > > > > > On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy lm@mcvoy.com wrote:
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > > > > > > > > to free.
> > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > > > > > > > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > > > > > > > > This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> > > > > > > > > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > > > FYI.
> > > > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > > > Arnold
> > > > > > > > > > > --
> > > > > > > > > > > ---
> > > > > > > > > > > Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Joseph Holsten]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023, at 13:09, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> […] I mean to research in earnest if there's a BSD/V7-ish 
> init that actually gels well with Linux+Glibc userspace.

Have you attempted slackware’s distro? My current work keeps me in RHEL derivatives when I’m using Linux, but slack was lovely in the 90s.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 22:09, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>  if there's a BSD/V7-ish init that actually gels well with Linux+Glibc userspace.

This might interest you, then.

https://chimera-linux.org/

I haven't tried it yet myself.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023, Larry McVoy wrote:

> Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the 
> desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.

They'll have to pry my FreeBSD server from my cold dead hands :-)

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 17:43, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
> desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.

Actually, I think that's not true any more.

ChromeBooks outsold Mac in the USA in 2017, and worldwide by 2020.

(Sales have fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, but that's because
so many people have one and are happy with it, I think.)

I think that's in the region of 250-300 million desktop Linux users.

Secondly, the PRoC has a "5-3-2 programme" in place to compel all
organisations to move to Linux and get rid of American OSes. Last year
was the nominal completion when 98% of machines were to have been
replaced or reinstalled; the assumption was that there would be at
least 2% of Windows boxes that they _couldn't_ readily replace.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/09/china_orders_ban_on_us_computers_and_software/

I've looked at OpenKylin. It's Ubuntu. Deepin is Debian underneath
although they're planning to move away from it.

It's hard to get any reliable figures, but frankly, Ubuntu Kylin and
Deepin are good, attractive, friendly OSes. They are frankly better
and friendlier than GNOME or KDE, IMHO, and they're working on things
like dual root partitions with failover, like ChromeOS has.

I suspect that there may be another 100 million to maybe 250M users there, too.

Which means about half a billion Linux desktops and laptops out there.

It's not that Linux on the desktop never happened. It did, from
2017-2020. It's over. It's history.

But the Linux world, predictably, didn't notice and doesn't count
these as "proper" Linuxes.

ChromeOS is a 100% a Linux, based on Gentoo, but it's not aimed at
Linux users. It doesn't even have a package manager.

And too many of we Westerners don't bother looking at stuff with funny
writing from far away, so they don't notice this stuff. I've lost
count of how many Ubuntu distro roundups just dismiss Kylin as "the
version for China" and don't even try it. (The few that do, like it.)

I tried to give an overview:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/30/kylin_the_multiple_semiofficial_chinese/

If I am right, and I don't have strong evidence, then I suspect that
there, ballpark, as many Kylin and Deepin users as ChromeOS users, and
that put together, they account for about 90% of Linux users. In other
words, the estimates of western distro usage are about 1/10 of the
real picture.


-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[arnold]

Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:

> Secondly, the PRoC has a "5-3-2 programme" in place to compel all
> organisations to move to Linux and get rid of American OSes. Last year
> was the nominal completion when 98% of machines were to have been
> replaced or reinstalled; the assumption was that there would be at
> least 2% of Windows boxes that they _couldn't_ readily replace.
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/09/china_orders_ban_on_us_computers_and_software/
>
> I've looked at OpenKylin. It's Ubuntu. Deepin is Debian underneath
> although they're planning to move away from it.

OK, so far so good for the numbers, but how much do those distributions
let the PROC government monitor what its citizens are doing? There
are political, non-technical reasons to avoid anything coming out
of China. And yes, this is even way more off topic.

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

eh..

arnold@skeeve.com wrote in
 <202301191512.30JFCmmI017248@freefriends.org>:
 |Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
 |> Secondly, the PRoC has a "5-3-2 programme" in place to compel all
 |> organisations to move to Linux and get rid of American OSes. Last year
 |> was the nominal completion when 98% of machines were to have been
 |> replaced or reinstalled; the assumption was that there would be at
 |> least 2% of Windows boxes that they _couldn't_ readily replace.
 |>
 |> https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/09/china_orders_ban_on_us_computers_\
 |> and_software/
 |>
 |> I've looked at OpenKylin. It's Ubuntu. Deepin is Debian underneath
 |> although they're planning to move away from it.
 |
 |OK, so far so good for the numbers, but how much do those distributions
 |let the PROC government monitor what its citizens are doing? There
 |are political, non-technical reasons to avoid anything coming out
 |of China. And yes, this is even way more off topic.

..here a non-movable stand for the opposite.
(In fact China has always been my only hope.  That is about fourty
years now.)  But surely very off-topic.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Doug McIntyre]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 04:02:18PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> ChromeBooks outsold Mac in the USA in 2017, and worldwide by 2020.
> (Sales have fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, but that's because
> so many people have one and are happy with it, I think.)

I think you need to s/people/schools/ on that statement. Education really ramped
in that time frame to get every student a chromebook. 

I'd really like to see chromebook sales broken apart into consumer and education segments. 

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Chet Ramey]

On 1/19/23 1:24 PM, Doug McIntyre wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 04:02:18PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>> ChromeBooks outsold Mac in the USA in 2017, and worldwide by 2020.
>> (Sales have fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, but that's because
>> so many people have one and are happy with it, I think.)
> 
> I think you need to s/people/schools/ on that statement. Education really ramped
> in that time frame to get every student a chromebook.

I was on the school board during that period, including where we offered a
hybrid learning model during covid, and I can confirm we did. But having
committed to that policy, you have to keep purchasing for every incoming
freshman class (or wherever you start), especially if you let the kids keep
them when they graduate.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 19:25, Doug McIntyre <merlyn@geeks.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 04:02:18PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> > ChromeBooks outsold Mac in the USA in 2017, and worldwide by 2020.
> > (Sales have fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, but that's because
> > so many people have one and are happy with it, I think.)
>
> I think you need to s/people/schools/ on that statement.

OK, so many _owners_ have one.

I do not know much about the education market. My only child is just 3
so is not in one yet. I went to 9 different schools in 3 countries on
2 continents so I am not a good example myself. And I currently live
in a country where I'm not fluent in the local language (I am trying
but it's my 6th and I'm old) so I don't know much about its
educational system, even though I have taught in it.

But my vague impression is that the high penetration of Chromebooks in
education is something of a North American or maybe USA peculiarity,
and I don't think this can be generalised worldwide.

My _impression_ is that European schools do not routinely provide
students with computers, and mostly that students are not allowed to
use computers in class, except possibly in computer classes. Wealthier
families may of course buy them for their children but this is not a
given or a universal or even all that common.

Americans have a disproportionately high standard of living and are
often unaware of this. For instance, in other retrocomputing groups, I
find that many collectors and hobbyisyts from the USA are almost
totally unaware of _the_ single most widespread, most successful, most
widely-cloned family of 8-bit home computers: the Sinclair Research ZX
Spectrum. In Western Europe, Apple/Commodore/Atari were too expensive
for most private owners in the early 1980s, and while Apple made the
first sub-$1000 home computer, that was still the price of a family
car. Sinclair made the first sub-£100 one which ordinary families
could buy for their children. In the late 1980s, as the West moved to
16-bit machines, instead Eastern Europe adopted hundreds of clones of
the ZX Spectrum, which before the fall of Communism were affordable to
build at hobbyist scale. (There were many others, including PDP-11
home computers and things, but the Spectrum dominated by far.) I never
saw a single Apple II in private ownership in the 20th century. Not
one, not even among wealthy friends or acquaintances.

> Education really ramped
> in that time frame to get every student a chromebook.

I think that is a local observation and is false for the world in
general. I don't _know_ this but let me put it this way: in the last
decade in the computer industry, living in 3 different cities in 2
countries, and new citizenship of a third, including _making_ several
Chromebooks with Cloudready or Flex and giving them away, I have seen
*one* (1) in private ownership. ONE person I know personally owns one
of the things.

They still cost as much as a cheap used motorcycle over here, and
times are hard at present. People are more likely to be limping along
on old Win XP computers.

They are selling well but they are very much not one-per-student or
one-per-family in ROTW, no.

> I'd really like to see chromebook sales broken apart into consumer and education segments.

Also, regionally.

I think you would be shocked by the difference between North America,
Europe, the rest of the Anglosphere, and Asia.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Harald Arnesen]

Liam Proven [20/01/2023 14.09]:

> My_impression_  is that European schools do not routinely provide
> students with computers, and mostly that students are not allowed to
> use computers in class, except possibly in computer classes. Wealthier
> families may of course buy them for their children but this is not a
> given or a universal or even all that common.

In Norway, children are given either iPads or Android pads from a very 
young age. I don't know if they keep them when they quit school 
(probably, they will be outdated after a few years).
-- 
Hilsen Harald
Слава Україні!

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

I've been waffling between Linux and FreeBSD as a main driver the past few years.  While I generally find Linux to be all around more responsive and compatible with hardware, I find configuration and system maintenance much more cut and dry on BSD's in general.  /etc feels a bit less like a jumbled mess and I can usually expect things to just "work" whereas Linux sometimes there's some hefty finagling to figure out where distro author X decided to put feature or file Y despite 30 other distros and other UNIXes even putting it in the same place.  To be fair, BSDs only win out here due to numbers, of course more Linux distros = more entropy.

This is largely the phenomenon that pushed me into building my systems up from scratch moreso then not.  Then the only people deciding how my system works are myself and the package authors, not some middle layer of distro managers that all seem to have conflicting ideas of how a UNIX system should work and present itself.  If I can do all sorts of fancy desktop things but can't even expect ed(1) and vi(1) to be around, how can it be called a UNIX-like?

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 8:19 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:


> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> kernel dev. Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> 
> It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS. Windows, MacOS, and
> Linux seem like the future.
> 
> As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> the lack of someone like Linus. That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> hasn't changed. That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
> 
> > I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as time goes on. Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD. That said, security implications of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.
> > 
> > Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
> > 
> > - Matt G.
> > 
> > ------- Original Message -------
> > On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy lm@mcvoy.com wrote:
> > 
> > > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > > to free.
> > > 
> > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > > This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> > > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > > > 
> > > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > > > 
> > > > > FYI.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Arnold
> > > 
> > > --
> > > ---
> > > Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
> 
> 
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Adam Thornton]

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On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 9:20 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
>
>
That one's not entirely on the users.

There's plenty of blame for Oracle as well.

I was the person nominally in charge of the OpenSolaris port to z (Neale
Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting) when Sine Nomine built it, having
read the tea leaves and believing that IBM would buy Sun.  And then IBM
tightened the screws a little too far and Larry Ellison grabbed it
instead.  Dammit.

OpenSolaris development had been pretty lively, but then Oracle made it
clear they didn't have any interest in keeping it alive.  Illumos did its
best.

Adam

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 05:54:00PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 9:20 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> > kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
> >
> >
> That one's not entirely on the users.
> 
> There's plenty of blame for Oracle as well.
> 
> I was the person nominally in charge of the OpenSolaris port to z (Neale
> Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting) when Sine Nomine built it, having
> read the tea leaves and believing that IBM would buy Sun.  And then IBM
> tightened the screws a little too far and Larry Ellison grabbed it
> instead.  Dammit.

Yeah, I'm not a Solaris fan (because SunOS) but there was some good 
technology in there.  Would have been cool if IBM kept it going.  I
never really understood why Sun was up for sale.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 05:09:39PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > I was the person nominally in charge of the OpenSolaris port to z (Neale
> > Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting) when Sine Nomine built it, having
> > read the tea leaves and believing that IBM would buy Sun.  And then IBM
> > tightened the screws a little too far and Larry Ellison grabbed it
> > instead.  Dammit.
> 
> Yeah, I'm not a Solaris fan (because SunOS) but there was some good 
> technology in there.  Would have been cool if IBM kept it going.  I
> never really understood why Sun was up for sale.

From my understanding, Sun was up for sale because of competitive
challenges with the high-end servers (due to delays in their high-end
Sparc chips, such as Rock) against products such as IBM's Power
(pSeries) machines.  These systems had a much better margin, and so if
you're making money primarily off of hardware, this segment is super
important.  The x86 servers don't make as much money, which is why IBM
would end up divesting their xSeries business to Lenovo.

IBM was primarily interested in Sun for the Java business; it was
super important for IBM Software side of the business, since all of
its major products (Webshere, Tivoli, etc.) were written in Java.  IBM
didn't really care about Solaris or the Sparc business; after all,
IBM's pSeries with AIX was doing quite well from a sales perspective
in the customer segments that were most important for IBM.

When I was part of the IBM Linux Technology Center, I participated in
an IBM-wide study about whether or not it made sense to invest in file
system technologies.  What was interesting about it was that it was
*purely* from a business perspective; would it drive business to IBM?
Would IBM customers find it useful enough to pay $$$ for it?  IBM's
decision to not try to invest in some of the cool technologies like
those that ZFS was pioneering was purely made as a purely cold-hearted
business decision.  Whether it was cool technology or not didn't enter
into the evaluation and decision function.

I'm not going to say that this way of making technology decisions is
perfect; it definitely has downsides.  But I *am* sure it reflected
what IBM was willing to pay for Sun Microsystems the company --- and
Sun was hoping for more $$$ for its shareholders, which is a
completely fair attitude.  Was Sun Microsystems worth more to Oracle?
I'm not sure, especially since Oracle has mostly treated Solaris as a
program loader for Oracle Enterprise Database.  But at the end of the
day Larrison Ellison was willing to pay more, whether or not it was a
principled business decision, or just a desire to take home the Sun
Microsystems trophy.  And at some level, it really doesn't matter.

Realistically, I'm not sure Solaris would have fared that much better
under IBM's stewardship.  I'm sure IBM would make Solaris available to
those customers who wanted to use it, and IBM would have maintained
Open Solaris as a open source project.  But the decision on how much
to invest into new technologies like DTrace and ZFS would have been
made the same way that IBM *declined* to try to create a next
generation file system for AIX or Linux.  And the DTrace and ZFS
technologies would have been integrated into Linux (under the GPL
license) and AIX, thus adding Solaris technological distinctiveness to
those OS's.  And while Sun's existing customers might still want
Solaris, IBM's customers would very likely stick with the AIX and
Linux that they knew.

So that would leave Open Solaris competing with Linux as an open
source project, without necessarily IBM investing much into Open
Solaris except from a hardware enablement perspective, and with the
best Solaris features getting cherry-picked into Linux.  So it would
ultimately depend on how much external investment from other companies
might make into Open Solaris versus Linux.  And there, a lot of Linux
investment came because its use in the embedded and mobile space.
(Linux's ext4 encryption and fsverity features was for Android and
ChromeOS; it was *not* developed for the data center use cases,
although there are now some use cases starting to pick up the data
center world.)  Would Open Solaris been flexible enough to fit on
wrist watches and handheld phones?  It's definitely an interesting
question, especially, given Linux would have a head start in those
worlds.

						- Ted

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dan Cross]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 1:39 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> [snip]
> Would Open Solaris been flexible enough to fit on
> wrist watches and handheld phones?  It's definitely an interesting
> question, especially, given Linux would have a head start in those
> worlds.

Given that those phones and wrist watches are orders of magnitude more
powerful in just about every way than the SPARC machines Solaris had
been running on at the time, I'd guess the answer to this would be
"yes". Whether that would have been the right call from a commercial
perspective is the more interesting question. It could certainly have
cleared the technology hurdles, though.

        - Dan C.

Last summer, still recovering from the after-effects of a bout of
COVID and jetlagged from our last trip to India, we took our kids
swimming. I very carefully put my keys and wallet into my bag, and
jumped into the deep end of the pool with my older kid...only to
almost immediately remember that my phone was in the pocket of my swim
trunks. Oops. My trusty Pixel 5 (which I liked very much!) did not
survive. A new Pixel 6 came a few days later. It struck me, looking at
its specs, that it was more powerful in every dimension than the IBM
ES/3090-600S I used briefly in the early 1990s...and that machine
routinely supported 1,000 interactive timesharing users under VM/ESA!
It certainly blew the few UltraSPARC machines I still have down in the
basement away. I haven't benchmarked it, but I imagine even the IO
performance is better.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[John Cowan]

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On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 1:59 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

A new Pixel 6 came a few days later. It struck me, looking at
> its specs, that it was more powerful in every dimension than the IBM
> ES/3090-600S I used briefly in the early 1990s...and that machine
> routinely supported 1,000 interactive timesharing users under VM/ESA!
>

Not every dimension.  Specifically, the ES/3090 had static RAM and a far
more performant bus than any Sun machine.

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dan Cross]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 2:48 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 1:59 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>> A new Pixel 6 came a few days later. It struck me, looking at
>> its specs, that it was more powerful in every dimension than the IBM
>> ES/3090-600S I used briefly in the early 1990s...and that machine
>> routinely supported 1,000 interactive timesharing users under VM/ESA!
>
> Not every dimension.  Specifically, the ES/3090 had static RAM and a far more performant bus than any Sun machine.

Yes, but I was referring to my cell phone, not a Sun machine. :-)

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Kevin Bowling]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 11:39 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 05:09:39PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > I was the person nominally in charge of the OpenSolaris port to z (Neale
> > > Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting) when Sine Nomine built it, having
> > > read the tea leaves and believing that IBM would buy Sun.  And then IBM
> > > tightened the screws a little too far and Larry Ellison grabbed it
> > > instead.  Dammit.
> >
> > Yeah, I'm not a Solaris fan (because SunOS) but there was some good
> > technology in there.  Would have been cool if IBM kept it going.  I
> > never really understood why Sun was up for sale.
>
> From my understanding, Sun was up for sale because of competitive
> challenges with the high-end servers (due to delays in their high-end
> Sparc chips, such as Rock) against products such as IBM's Power
> (pSeries) machines.  These systems had a much better margin, and so if
> you're making money primarily off of hardware, this segment is super
> important.  The x86 servers don't make as much money, which is why IBM
> would end up divesting their xSeries business to Lenovo.
>
> IBM was primarily interested in Sun for the Java business; it was
> super important for IBM Software side of the business, since all of
> its major products (Webshere, Tivoli, etc.) were written in Java.  IBM
> didn't really care about Solaris or the Sparc business; after all,
> IBM's pSeries with AIX was doing quite well from a sales perspective
> in the customer segments that were most important for IBM.
>
> When I was part of the IBM Linux Technology Center, I participated in
> an IBM-wide study about whether or not it made sense to invest in file
> system technologies.  What was interesting about it was that it was
> *purely* from a business perspective; would it drive business to IBM?
> Would IBM customers find it useful enough to pay $$$ for it?  IBM's
> decision to not try to invest in some of the cool technologies like
> those that ZFS was pioneering was purely made as a purely cold-hearted
> business decision.  Whether it was cool technology or not didn't enter
> into the evaluation and decision function.

GPFS (now called Spectrum Scale?) is one of the most featured
filesystems I can think of, I bet it met both definitions?

> I'm not going to say that this way of making technology decisions is
> perfect; it definitely has downsides.  But I *am* sure it reflected
> what IBM was willing to pay for Sun Microsystems the company --- and
> Sun was hoping for more $$$ for its shareholders, which is a
> completely fair attitude.  Was Sun Microsystems worth more to Oracle?
> I'm not sure, especially since Oracle has mostly treated Solaris as a
> program loader for Oracle Enterprise Database.  But at the end of the
> day Larrison Ellison was willing to pay more, whether or not it was a
> principled business decision, or just a desire to take home the Sun
> Microsystems trophy.  And at some level, it really doesn't matter.
>
> Realistically, I'm not sure Solaris would have fared that much better
> under IBM's stewardship.  I'm sure IBM would make Solaris available to
> those customers who wanted to use it, and IBM would have maintained
> Open Solaris as a open source project.  But the decision on how much
> to invest into new technologies like DTrace and ZFS would have been
> made the same way that IBM *declined* to try to create a next
> generation file system for AIX or Linux.  And the DTrace and ZFS
> technologies would have been integrated into Linux (under the GPL
> license) and AIX, thus adding Solaris technological distinctiveness to
> those OS's.  And while Sun's existing customers might still want
> Solaris, IBM's customers would very likely stick with the AIX and
> Linux that they knew.

One bit of anecdote, AIX does have a dynamic tracing system comprable
to DTrace called ProbeVue.  So I think the relative cost of new
engineering on whatever Sun had to offer was never too high.  And that
is congruent with my understanding of the technology business, most
times acquisitions are to gain customers (aka revenue) and seldom
employees (aka aquihire).  Business technology transfers are usually a
sign of something gone wrong, with occasional flukes of success.

> So that would leave Open Solaris competing with Linux as an open
> source project, without necessarily IBM investing much into Open
> Solaris except from a hardware enablement perspective, and with the
> best Solaris features getting cherry-picked into Linux.  So it would
> ultimately depend on how much external investment from other companies
> might make into Open Solaris versus Linux.  And there, a lot of Linux
> investment came because its use in the embedded and mobile space.
> (Linux's ext4 encryption and fsverity features was for Android and
> ChromeOS; it was *not* developed for the data center use cases,
> although there are now some use cases starting to pick up the data
> center world.)  Would Open Solaris been flexible enough to fit on
> wrist watches and handheld phones?  It's definitely an interesting
> question, especially, given Linux would have a head start in those
> worlds.
>
>                                                 - Ted

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Marc Donner]

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Back in the mid-late 1980s I was at IBM Research where I was sort of the
proprietor of a bunch of Unix boxes (about 200+, about split evenly between
Sun machines and RT-PCs running BSD 4.3 (the ACIS port).  I was in the
Mathematics department and we called it Mathnet.  Rekhter developed the BGP
stuff on one of our machines and Zadeck implemented the SSA stuff on one.

When the RS-6000 and AIX 3 were under preparation the AIX folks asked us to
help get AIX 3 ready for the real world.  They gave us a bunch of RS-6000s
(we looked at them and laughed - "what a whale" one of us said ... we
called the lab Marineland) and we tried integrating them into our UNIX
single (single-ish) system image.

We maintained our (rough) image consistency by rdisting stuff, including
administrative junk, from a central set of machines to all of the others.

Well, the AIX systems depended on this database called the ODM (we called
it the odious data mangler).

The problem was that the designers of the ODM envisioned themselves as
managing a mainframe.  The ODM commingled information about the
installation (the entire site), the instance (the box itself), and the
community (users and stuff).  This meant that the database included device
identifiers.

We tried rdist-ing the ODM from our central machine to all the rest of our
machines.  Oops ... lobotomies all around.

I won't bore you with all of the details, but it was a struggle.

At one point I threatened the head of AIX 3 development in Austin, TX that
I would post the source code of some major component to rec.humor.funny.
He was not my friend.

Anyway, we did end up making a list of horrible things that they absolutely
had to fix.  And, to their credit, they got a lot of it fixed so that when
the RS-6000 and AIX 3 did ship it was not humiliating.

It was probably my first run-in with the pragmatics of shipping real
commercial production software.

Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 7:55 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 9:20 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
>> kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
>>
>>
> That one's not entirely on the users.
>
> There's plenty of blame for Oracle as well.
>
> I was the person nominally in charge of the OpenSolaris port to z (Neale
> Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting) when Sine Nomine built it, having
> read the tea leaves and believing that IBM would buy Sun.  And then IBM
> tightened the screws a little too far and Larry Ellison grabbed it
> instead.  Dammit.
>
> OpenSolaris development had been pretty lively, but then Oracle made it
> clear they didn't have any interest in keeping it alive.  Illumos did its
> best.
>
> Adam
>

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Joseph Holsten]

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On Wed, Jan 18, 2023, at 17:17, Marc Donner wrote:
> I won't bore you with all of the details, but it was a struggle.

Clearly, you mistake your audience. I would probably read a multi-volume series of these struggles.

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Marc Donner]

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Well, it should probably be a separate thread, since the struggle went on
for a long time.  We were ultimately able to integrate the AIX 3 systems
with our network, but it involved computing the inverse FFT of the ODM on
our master machine(s) and then disting that information as a script to the
other machines.  Then we applied the updates to each machine locally.

It thus became much harder to verify that each machine was essentially
identical to every other.  Of course, part of the problem was that with
expensive licensed software it was easy to make an economic justification
for the machines being configured idiosyncratically.  We conceptualized
them as development workstations, so we wanted them to be as identical as
possible.

A while later, after I got very frustrated with IBM's failure to support my
distributed systems work, I left and went to Morgan Stanley where I ended
up running (and evolving) the Unix environment used by the Fixed Income
department.  In order to avoid single-vendor lockin we decided that ten or
fifteen percent of our machines would be RS-6000s.

We wanted, however, to have an absolutely identical environment so that any
user could sit down at any machine and have it just work.  Brian Redman
ended up being the technical lead on that effort.  We coined the motto, "If
it doesn't work on the IBMs, it doesn't work."  In a few cases we had third
party products that only ran on Sun machines.  Fortunately the X Window
System allowed us to run the binary on a Sun compute server while
displaying a window on the user's machine (Sun or IBM).  Brian streamlined
all of that to the point where there were no visible seams.

We had to standardize the user profiles, which was a bigger task than it
seemed at first.

Best,

Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 8:27 PM Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023, at 17:17, Marc Donner wrote:
>
> I won't bore you with all of the details, but it was a struggle.
>
>
> Clearly, you mistake your audience. I would probably read a multi-volume
> series of these struggles.
>

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 17:20, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.

I believe 0x1DE computer are working on that. :-)

> As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> hasn't changed.

I entirely agree.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 9:46 AM Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 17:20, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly have the time to do
> > kernel dev.  Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
>
> I believe 0x1DE computer are working on that. :-)

It's true we run illumos on the host. That's ideally transparent to
users, though.

Outside of Oxide, illumos is used in several places, but it's fair to
say that it's nowhere near as popular as Linux or the BSDs.

illumos is, as far as we know, the only actively-maintained open
source System V derivative. Is it Unix? I don't know; there's
definitely AT&T code in there. The kernel binary is called "unix", if
that matters. But I don't think anyone has bothered to keep up with
the UNIX(TM) trademark certification. To the extent your article was
concerned with systems that do that, I think you were largely right
(though macOS doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon). But
to say that illumos, or the BSDs for that matter, aren't "Unix" in
terms of interface or use seems incorrect.

I don't think that Larry is wrong arout Solaris, but I think that
Oracle re-closing the source probably also had a lot to do with it.
Still, OpenSolaris never gained critical mass; maybe it was just too
little too late. It is striking how Unix has repeatedly suffered
through corporate shortsightedness; how much of Linux's success is due
to being free of that?

> > As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
> > the lack of someone like Linus.  That was obvious 30 years ago and it
> > hasn't changed.
>
> I entirely agree.

Meh. I don't know. I'll make a prediction: at least one of the BSDs
will outlive Linux.

Linux right now sort of reminds me of commercial Unix in the 90s.
Personally, I think something's going to come from out of left field
and displace it within the next 15 years, just like Linux displaced
(and yes, killed) commercial Unix. Compatibility shims for the API
will continue to exist, but the implementation will be very different.

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Bakul Shah]

On Jan 19, 2023, at 7:05 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Meh. I don't know. I'll make a prediction: at least one of the BSDs
> will outlive Linux.

Even though I prefer *BSD to Linux I am afraid this is
unlikely when people are talking about porting µClinux
to a 10 cent riscv part (CH32V003)! Granted it is not a
full linux but still. BSDs have no resources for this.
Worse, many of these parts are insufficiently documented,
the same disease that afflicts all the io device vendors
who provide some windows/Linux driver but not enough
detailed documentation. And we will likely see more such
embedded devices in all sorts of inexpensive widgets.

> Linux right now sort of reminds me of commercial Unix in the 90s.
> Personally, I think something's going to come from out of left field
> and displace it within the next 15 years, just like Linux displaced
> (and yes, killed) commercial Unix. Compatibility shims for the API
> will continue to exist, but the implementation will be very different.

I wonder if the era of general purpose computers will
survive.

[TUHS] The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Will Senn]

On 1/19/23 10:59 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> I wonder if the era of general purpose computers will
> survive.
Provocative! I too wonder this and if the end of personalized 
computation is going the way of the dodo bird along with it. Is the 
future coming where I will only be allowed to run approved applications 
on my device (via something like an App store or somesuch)? I sure hope 
not, but it seems to be where we're headed. The good news being that 
those apps will be curated (not censored, right?) to just be good for me.

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

> Is the future coming where I will only be allowed to run approved applications
> on my device (via something like an App store or somesuch)?

This so much.  I've gone full circle on smartphones by this point, begrudgingly accepted getting one at my parents behest many years ago, then ditched the thing in 2020 and never looked back.  Luckily I never had the displeasure of an Apple device, so had a bit more control than they allow, but still didn't like the implications of smartphone OS norms.

The idea that I can fully pay for and own a device and yet generally have to exploit some sort of security loophole or backdoor developer feature to actually use the device fully is completely asinine to me.  I could see a case for not having root access on a phone that hasn't been paid off yet, but that root access isn't expressly granted on completion of a payment plan is an insult to users.

It's a bummer too because I want to be excited about the idea of potentially having a powerful computer with me just about anywhere, but at the same time, if that power is significantly throttled (see Game "Optimizing" Service...), and full root access to the device is not granted easily, then it's not any more useful to me than a kiosk at Walmart.

One thing that makes me particularly sad about the decrease in effective computer accessibility (effective being a loaded term here for root access, control of applications, etc.) is that having a good computer and access to the right information can make a subject-matter expert of anyone willing to put in the time.  In my own experience, having relatively unimpeded access to computers since I was a kid is the key reason I've been able to learn so much.  Taking that way and replacing it with stuff like Chromebooks and smart devices diminishes the likelihood of the right person having the right computer at the right time.  Not to say that people won't still be inventive, but who knows what influence a bunch of Apple-ized computation will have on the next generation, vs the influence of relatively widespread and open systems in the decades preceding.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Rich Morin]

Several projects are attempting to target cell phones with (mostly) Linux variants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_mobile_devices).  Most of these are focused on particular (or even custom) hardware, but at least one has the explicit goal of supporting "old" hardware:

> We are sick of not receiving updates shortly after buying new phones. Sick of the walled gardens deeply integrated into Android and iOS. That's why we are developing a sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions. With privilege separation in mind. Let's keep our devices useful and safe until they physically break!

https://postmarketos.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS

I'm particularly interested in this project, because it might let a few billion (!) retired cell phones be used as portable computing and communication devices. Here is a current snapshot of their porting progress:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

-r

> On Jan 19, 2023, at 12:09, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> ... I want to be excited about the idea of potentially having a powerful computer with me just about anywhere, but at the same time, if that power is significantly throttled (see Game "Optimizing" Service...), and full root access to the device is not granted easily, then it's not any more useful to me than a kiosk at Walmart. ...

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

Planned obsolescence is, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting concepts in the whole of engineering.  The idea that anyone would, in good faith (HAH!), purposefully subvert reliability and dependability engineering solely to ensure frequent turnover of their product is mindboggling.  At the very least it's my opinion that all these cell manufacturers (and lets face it, IoT manufacturers) designing their devices to be thrown away and replaced every couple of years should be 100% responsible for the environmental implications of shipping nominally temporary/destined for the scrap heap piles of heavy metals, plastics, etc, all over the globe.

Instead these companies are shoveling tons and tons of resources into the market knowing they're going to be landfill material only a few years after release.  Yeah there are recycling programs, but even then, it just feels like the general public being made to run on a treadmill of buy this, now donate it back for recycling, now buy the same resources again repackaged in a shiny new box.  I'm willing to wager, security and protocol issues aside, most consumers would do just fine with computing technology circa the late 90's/early 00's still, but dangit that new iPhone has a couple more megapixels.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 12:59 PM, Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:


> Several projects are attempting to target cell phones with (mostly) Linux variants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_mobile_devices). Most of these are focused on particular (or even custom) hardware, but at least one has the explicit goal of supporting "old" hardware:
> 
> > We are sick of not receiving updates shortly after buying new phones. Sick of the walled gardens deeply integrated into Android and iOS. That's why we are developing a sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions. With privilege separation in mind. Let's keep our devices useful and safe until they physically break!
> 
> 
> https://postmarketos.org
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS
> 
> I'm particularly interested in this project, because it might let a few billion (!) retired cell phones be used as portable computing and communication devices. Here is a current snapshot of their porting progress:
> 
> https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
> 
> -r
> 
> > On Jan 19, 2023, at 12:09, segaloco via TUHS tuhs@tuhs.org wrote:
> > ... I want to be excited about the idea of potentially having a powerful computer with me just about anywhere, but at the same time, if that power is significantly throttled (see Game "Optimizing" Service...), and full root access to the device is not granted easily, then it's not any more useful to me than a kiosk at Walmart. ...

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 21:10, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> The idea that I can fully pay for and own a device and yet generally have to exploit some sort of security loophole or backdoor developer feature to actually use the device fully is completely asinine to me.

I recently reviewed a Murena 1 that might tick some of your boxes:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/murena_e_foundation_phone_test/

De-Googled Android, sends nothing back to anyone, but can run off the
shelf Android apps.

If even that is too much, then there are other options. I am
considering buying a 2nd Planet Computers Gemini in order to run Jolla
Sailfish on it.

I would also rather like some used Google Pixel or something that I
could put Ubuntu Touch on. Work continues even though Canonical
cancelled it 5 or 6 years ago, and it's getting there. I've seen in
the flesh demos at the Ubuntu Summit here in Prague last November,
including one version of UT running a newer version inside a VM, on a
JingPad tablet.

Or PostmarketOS if you prefer a more DIY experience, perhaps on a
FairPhone or a PinePhone.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

To be completely honest, I'm considering just building myself a mobile using a single board computer with a small external display.  I've got one with 
a connector for cell touch displays right on the board.  Couple that with a USB-C power source and I've got my own mobile smart device.  Would be a little bulkier than say a traditional smart phone, and wouldn't have a phone number, but I don't care about either of those, I want the pocket computer part, not the banal communication people won't just have in person part.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Friday, January 20th, 2023 at 5:30 AM, Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:


> On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 21:10, segaloco via TUHS tuhs@tuhs.org wrote:
> 
> > The idea that I can fully pay for and own a device and yet generally have to exploit some sort of security loophole or backdoor developer feature to actually use the device fully is completely asinine to me.
> 
> 
> I recently reviewed a Murena 1 that might tick some of your boxes:
> 
> https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/murena_e_foundation_phone_test/
> 
> De-Googled Android, sends nothing back to anyone, but can run off the
> shelf Android apps.
> 
> If even that is too much, then there are other options. I am
> considering buying a 2nd Planet Computers Gemini in order to run Jolla
> Sailfish on it.
> 
> I would also rather like some used Google Pixel or something that I
> could put Ubuntu Touch on. Work continues even though Canonical
> cancelled it 5 or 6 years ago, and it's getting there. I've seen in
> the flesh demos at the Ubuntu Summit here in Prague last November,
> including one version of UT running a newer version inside a VM, on a
> JingPad tablet.
> 
> Or PostmarketOS if you prefer a more DIY experience, perhaps on a
> FairPhone or a PinePhone.
> 
> --
> Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
> Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
> UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Rich Morin]

One of the problems that cell phones solve is providing (relatively) instant-on capability.  The RasPi processor doesn't have hardware support for this; dunno which others might...

-r

> On Jan 20, 2023, at 07:51, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> To be completely honest, I'm considering just building myself a mobile using a single board computer with a small external display.  ...

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

If that means I don't have the whole jumble of other problems I'd have with owning a traditional smartphone, I can deal with actually turning it on and off with a full boot cycle.  Frankly the "always on" kinda disturbs me, so just one more thing I get better control of.

Not to drift the conversation too much though, towards the end of general purpose computing, I like that idea too because the particular single board I have in mind (a RISC-V one I've got) also has a traditional HDMI port and 4 USBs, and ethernet, so if I do it right, I have a mobile that I can also plug in K&M and a monitor to and use at a desk.  Society can pry my desk computing from my cold, dead hands, I've never felt as productive using a computing device in any other context.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Friday, January 20th, 2023 at 7:56 AM, Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:


> One of the problems that cell phones solve is providing (relatively) instant-on capability. The RasPi processor doesn't have hardware support for this; dunno which others might...
> 
> -r
> 
> > On Jan 20, 2023, at 07:51, segaloco via TUHS tuhs@tuhs.org wrote:
> > 
> > To be completely honest, I'm considering just building myself a mobile using a single board computer with a small external display. ...

[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2023-01-20T07:56:41-0800, Rich Morin wrote:
> One of the problems that cell phones solve is providing (relatively)
> instant-on capability.  The RasPi processor doesn't have hardware
> support for this; dunno which others might...

At 2023-01-20T16:24:50+0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> If that means I don't have the whole jumble of other problems I'd have
> with owning a traditional smartphone, I can deal with actually turning
> it on and off with a full boot cycle.  Frankly the "always on" kinda
> disturbs me, so just one more thing I get better control of.

Can someone characterize why solving this problem and having (near)
instant-on for such a device would be hard?  Lack of support for
low-power states in the CPU or on the board?

I don't see a huge gap between having to key in something to unlock my
phone versus a restoring from suspend-to-disk with a LUKS passphrase.
If you've suspended to disk you're pretty safe to operate in as
low-power a mode as you want.

> Not to drift the conversation too much though, towards the end of
> general purpose computing, I like that idea too because the particular
> single board I have in mind (a RISC-V one I've got)

I have heard that firmware blobs are just as ubiquitous and hard to
eliminate on RISC-V boards as they are everywhere else.  This is a real
problem for establishing a trusted computed base.  It seems everybody
who makes support chips is arc-welded to unverifiable code.  We'll have
to replace the stuff ourselves, slowly and painfully.  I submit that the
only way to win that battle in the long run is to copyleft it; otherwise
the community's work will simply wind up re-closed, with new features to
sell the board, and new backdoors thanks to sloppy bugs and friendly
handshakes from friendly guys in suits.

I'd love to be wrong about this.  Does someone have a curated list of
free firmwares for support chips (or SoC modules)?  Mondo bonus points
for them being written in a verifiable language like Spark/Ada.  Sorry
if I made you spit your coffee out there.  I think I know how far we are
from a better world.

> also has a traditional HDMI port and 4 USBs, and ethernet, so if I do
> it right, I have a mobile that I can also plug in K&M and a monitor to
> and use at a desk.  Society can pry my desk computing from my cold,
> dead hands, I've never felt as productive using a computing device in
> any other context.

Yup, that is very close to what I want in a so-called "convergence"
device.  The _ideal_ for me personally would be to put it in a clamshell
with an LCD over a Happy Hacking Keyboard.  That's the perfect form
factor (and key layout) for me.  I'd tote that thing everywhere.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

> I have heard that firmware blobs are just as ubiquitous and hard to
> eliminate on RISC-V boards as they are everywhere else. This is a real
> problem for establishing a trusted computed base. It seems everybody
> who makes support chips is arc-welded to unverifiable code. We'll have
> to replace the stuff ourselves, slowly and painfully. I submit that the
> only way to win that battle in the long run is to copyleft it; otherwise
> the community's work will simply wind up re-closed, with new features to
> sell the board, and new backdoors thanks to sloppy bugs and friendly
> handshakes from friendly guys in suits.

So in this case specifically the board I'm tinkering with is the VisionFive running a dual U74.  There is a bootrom that does DRAM training and some other aspects and then spits out into OpenSBI which loads u-boot off a secondary device.  I've been tinkering with the lowest levels of startup and it sounds like I can control almost everything, there is a reset vector into the QSPI flash (XiP) that kicks off that boot, contains the thing that loads the DDR init, then OpenSBI, etc.  I *think* it is the first instruction the CPU itself hits, not certain, but I think any "stuff" that happens is subsystems doing their own firmware stuff which I can't go any deeper than controlling the flash payload.

There is also a button that, when held on startup, redirects to a ROM containing a dirt simple prompt allowing XMODEM-CRC (almost...) transmission of payloads and then an arbitrary branch anywhere in at least the first 32 bits of address space.

Anywho, this is just more topic drift so I'll end the chain of my musings here, but if there's any spinoff discussions don't hesitate to just chat it up without the TUHS Cc :P

Long story short though is I'm hopeful RISC-V is headed in the correct direction with openness and such, so I'm putting more of my eggs in that basket as time goes on.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023, segaloco via TUHS wrote:

> I just hope we'll see some attempts at opening up these code bases as 
> time goes on.  Seeing as they're no longer going to be pushing new 
> copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up 
> the source would give their end users the ability to potentially float 
> their own improvements if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or 
> BSD.  That said, security implications of course, don't want to just 
> hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety in.

Certainly the stuff I've been currently working on would be made even more
irrelevant if a complete System V were made available under a license more 
like BSD than CDDL.

<snip>

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[arnold]

In hindsight, I agree. But at the time, Linux was less than
five years old, and it wasn't so obvious.

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> to free.
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
> > was crazy, but he was right.
> > 
> > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > 
> > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > >
> > > FYI.
> > >
> > > Arnold
>
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

I had already been using Linux for a while by then I believe.  I used
it before it had networking.

Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
with his leadership.  That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
that was missing in the BSD world.  If someone like him had appeared
and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 01:02:20AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> In hindsight, I agree. But at the time, Linux was less than
> five years old, and it wasn't so obvious.
> 
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > to free.
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
> > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > > 
> > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > 
> > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > >
> > > > FYI.
> > > >
> > > > Arnold
> >
> > -- 
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 8:04 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I had already been using Linux for a while by then I believe.  I used
> it before it had networking.
>
> Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
> with his leadership.  That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
> that was missing in the BSD world.  If someone like him had appeared
> and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.
>

By the time even 4.3BSD was released, there were dozens of people that
could work on the kernel at a high level of skill. There was no one person
who created it who could have the gravitas to pull that off. Let alone a
decade later when it was freed up, by then there were hundreds. The
dynamics of the situation were quite different: Linus always was in charge
because he wrote the whole thing...  BSD was a victim of it's own success
in the 80s and 90s in a way...

Warner


> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 01:02:20AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > In hindsight, I agree. But at the time, Linux was less than
> > five years old, and it wasn't so obvious.
> >
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> > > to free.
> > >
> > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > > > This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
> > > > was crazy, but he was right.
> > > >
> > > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > > > >
> > > > > FYI.
> > > > >
> > > > > Arnold
> > >
> > > --
> > > ---
> > > Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 08:20:16AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 8:04 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > I had already been using Linux for a while by then I believe.  I used
> > it before it had networking.
> >
> > Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
> > with his leadership.  That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
> > that was missing in the BSD world.  If someone like him had appeared
> > and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.
> >
> 
> By the time even 4.3BSD was released, there were dozens of people that
> could work on the kernel at a high level of skill. There was no one person
> who created it who could have the gravitas to pull that off. Let alone a
> decade later when it was freed up, by then there were hundreds. The
> dynamics of the situation were quite different: Linus always was in charge
> because he wrote the whole thing...  BSD was a victim of it's own success
> in the 80s and 90s in a way...

Linus was in charge because he started it.  At least 30 years ago I said
"He's good programmer, a good architect, and a good manager.  I've never
seen that in one person before".

He most certainly did not write the whole thing but he decided what went
in when.  He's quite good at that.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 10:21 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 8:04 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> I had already been using Linux for a while by then I believe.  I used
>> it before it had networking.
>>
>> Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
>> with his leadership.  That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
>> that was missing in the BSD world.  If someone like him had appeared
>> and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.
>
> By the time even 4.3BSD was released, there were dozens of people that could work on the kernel at a high level of skill.

There were also a lot of gatekeepers. Perhaps not so much in CSRG, but
certainly in the next tier out: if you weren't part of the in-crowd at
USENIX and on USENET, it was hard to contribute. Ted has referred to
this as kowtowing to the "Gods of BSD." He wasn't wrong, though I
think the dynamic has changed substantially in recent years.

> There was no one person who created it who could have the gravitas to pull that off. Let alone a decade later when it was freed up, by then there were hundreds. The dynamics of the situation were quite different: Linus always was in charge because he wrote the whole thing...  BSD was a victim of it's own success in the 80s and 90s in a way...

I'm struck by the thing Ken said in the video that was linked earlier,
so much of "success" has to do with luck. Unix was in the right place
at the right time, spread through universities, and escaped into
industry. It's one of the relatively few research projects that was
truly successful in that sense. But consider that it also had
something like five years to incubate in a lab before that happened,
and the members of that lab had a vested interest in making it useful
(after all, they were using it for their own consumption!). By the
time BSD came along, Unix already had a well-defined "shape" and a
certain degree of polish; contributing meant there was a bar you had
to hurdle.

On the other hand, Torvalds published Linux when it was still a toy,
but critically, at a point where the industry was at a real inflection
point, due to external factors. More capable research systems had been
out there before, and open source BSDs were right around the corner,
but they didn't win. I think this was mostly luck and timing. He also
pretty much took from everybody, which made it much more of a "big
tent" sort of thing as opposed to the faculty lunchroom vibe prevalent
in the Unix world (what I've previously described as, "the old-school
Unix mentality"). Periodically we see how this still rankles some,
even on this mailing list.

But it's interesting the way the "Gods of BSD vs the rebel alliance"
thing seems to have inverted itself. Getting stuff done in Linux these
days is pretty hard; oh sure, I suppose if you whip off a patch fixing
a typo in a comment or something, someone will just apply it. But if
you want to do something substantial, you have to be willing to invest
a lot of time and effort in shepherding it through the upstreaming
process, which implies you've got to have resources backing that
effort. And there's definitely an in-group. Meanwhile, the BSDs seem a
lot more accepting; maybe that's just me. At least FreeBSD and
DragonFly appear that way. Anyway, it seems fair to say that Linux
seems mostly beholden to the interests of big companies these days.

Linus is personally responsible for much of Linux's success, but I
think he will also be the thing that causes Linux's demise, though
indirectly. He's as much of a cult of personality as he is a technical
leader; when he's gone (and in the limit we're all mortal) who will
step into his shoes? Then again, maybe I'm wrong: I thought this would
happen when Jobs died, but Cook seems to have stepped into the role
nicely and Apple's doing just fine. Steve Jobs chose wisely; perhaps
Linus will as well.

        - Dan C.

>> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 01:02:20AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > In hindsight, I agree. But at the time, Linux was less than
>> > five years old, and it wasn't so obvious.
>> >
>> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
>> > > to free.
>> > >
>> > > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > > > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
>> > > > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
>> > > > This was in a private conversation we had.  I thought he
>> > > > was crazy, but he was right.
>> > > >
>> > > > arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> > > >
>> > > > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>> > > > >
>> > > > > FYI.
>> > > > >
>> > > > > Arnold
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > ---
>> > > Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>>
>> --
>> ---
>> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 9:41 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> But it's interesting the way the "Gods of BSD vs the rebel alliance"
> thing seems to have inverted itself. Getting stuff done in Linux these
> days is pretty hard; oh sure, I suppose if you whip off a patch fixing
> a typo in a comment or something, someone will just apply it. But if
> you want to do something substantial, you have to be willing to invest
> a lot of time and effort in shepherding it through the upstreaming
> process, which implies you've got to have resources backing that
> effort. And there's definitely an in-group. Meanwhile, the BSDs seem a
> lot more accepting; maybe that's just me. At least FreeBSD and
> DragonFly appear that way. Anyway, it seems fair to say that Linux
> seems mostly beholden to the interests of big companies these days.
>

This matches my experience: Lots of gatekeepers, any one of which can take
a disliking to your submission for what, at times, seems like arbitrary and
capricious reasons. If you make it to the 'in crowd' it becomes more of a
rubber stamp at times...  I have recently been successful at submitting an
obvious fix to a tiny backwater area of the kernel without undue stress
though...  But I submitted it to the maintainer of the area, who then
submitted it to the 'greater maintainer', and then to the greater
maintainer and then to the tree. So my tiny fix has more Signed-off-by:
lines than lines of change and took about two weeks to make its way all the
way up into the repo... For me, it took about 2x as long to prep and send
the change than it does for the direct commit access I have for FreeBSD,
but I've spent more than 10x on other submissions that ultimately didn't
make it in. This is in contrast to the few changes I got in in the 90s: I
sent an email to Ralf, who nit picked one or two things, which I fixed and
it wound up in his next batch of changes to Linus and made its way in (to
code that's sense been deleted, alas).

The BSD are more accepting, in general, though it can be hard to find the
right person to approve your change. There's too many ingest points still,
too many things fall on the floor, etc. Part of that is tooling, part of it
is culture, part of it is lack of clear docs, etc. It is generally easier
to get a change into the BSDs. It takes less persistance, on the average,
but it still takes more effort than it should.

I looked into Linux's processes to improve FreeBSD's. And came to the
conclusion that in large part they succeed despite their processes, not
because of them. They have too much overhead, rely too much on magic bots
that are hard to replicate and I'm astonished that things work as well as
they do. It's a grown culture / process that relies on old tools mixed with
new in weird ways you'd never think of standing up today. Things can be
learned from it, but it seems to be a unique snowflake relative to all the
other projects I looked at...

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 09:58:48AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 9:41 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > But it's interesting the way the "Gods of BSD vs the rebel alliance"
> > thing seems to have inverted itself. Getting stuff done in Linux these
> > days is pretty hard; oh sure, I suppose if you whip off a patch fixing
> > a typo in a comment or something, someone will just apply it. But if
> > you want to do something substantial, you have to be willing to invest
> > a lot of time and effort in shepherding it through the upstreaming
> > process, which implies you've got to have resources backing that
> > effort.....
> 
> This matches my experience: Lots of gatekeepers, any one of which can take
> a disliking to your submission for what, at times, seems like arbitrary and
> capricious reasons. If you make it to the 'in crowd' it becomes more of a
> rubber stamp at times...  I have recently been successful at submitting an
> obvious fix to a tiny backwater area of the kernel without undue stress
> though...  But I submitted it to the maintainer of the area, who then
> submitted it to the 'greater maintainer', and then to the greater
> maintainer and then to the tree. So my tiny fix has more Signed-off-by:
> lines than lines of change and took about two weeks to make its way all the
> way up into the repo...   For me, it took about 2x as long to prep and send
> the change than it does for the direct commit access I have for FreeBSD,
> but I've spent more than 10x on other submissions that ultimately didn't
> make it in.

I'll note that a lot of this is a matter of scale.  There are roughly
15,000 commits added to the Linux kernel per 9 week release cycle.
That translates to roughly 10 commits per hour, 7 days a week, 24
hours a day.

From an upstream maintainer's perspective, what matters is whether a
commit handled in time for it to make the next release train.  So
whether it takes two days or two weeks to get a patch in the repo is
not considered important.  What *is* important is that commits that
are up for review before, say, at least two weeks before the opening
of the merge window, are reviewed in time for them to be pulled into
Linus's tree when the merge window next opens.  If it is an urgent bug
fix, then it will be acted upon more expeditiously, but the reality is
most users won't see it until the the fix is backported into the
Long-Term Stable kernel that their distribution or product kernel is
derived from.

For more substantial contributions, one of the reasons why there are
so many gatekeepers is mainly due to the fact that we've had far too
many cases of "drive-by contributions" where a company tries to dump a
whole new file system, or massive changes to a large number of systems
--- and then once the code lands in the tree, the developers vanish.
And now we're left with the question of whether we just drop the
subsystems, and screw-over the users who have started to depend on the
new functionality.  This may be one of the places where the Linux
culture of "thou shall never cause user-space visible regressions" has
its downside --- it means that it's a lot harder to accept new
functionality unless there is strong confidence that contributor is
there for the long haul, and admittedly that's a lot easier if you are
a member of the "in-crowd".

> I looked into Linux's processes to improve FreeBSD's. And came to the
> conclusion that in large part they succeed despite their processes, not
> because of them. They have too much overhead, rely too much on magic bots
> that are hard to replicate and I'm astonished that things work as well as
> they do.

I think that if you divide the total overhead by the number of commits
that land in each release, the overhead isn't really that bad.  Sure,
a tractor-trailer truck has a lot more overhead than say, a bicycle;
but you can haul an awful lot more in a semi-trailer truck than you
can in a bicycle rack.  Hence, the overhead of a semi is arguably much
less, once you take into account how much you can fit in a
tractor-trailer.

Also, it's actually not *that* expensive, even in absolute terms.  For
example, I run about 26 hours worth of regression tests (using a dozen
VM's, so the wall clock time is about 2 hours), using gce-xfstests[1],
and the retail cost if I didn't have corporate sponsorship is less
than $2 USD for a complete set of ext4 tests.  And I made a point of
making well documented and easy for others to standup so they can test
their own file systems if they want.  The reason why I did all of this
packaging work was to try to get graduate students to understand how
much work left to get a publishable file system, such as say
BetrFS[3], into a production-ready state for real-world use.  :-)

[1] https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests
[2] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/Documentation/gce-xfstests.md
[3] https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast15/technical-sessions/presentation/jannen


> It's a grown culture / process that relies on old tools mixed with
> new in weird ways you'd never think of standing up today. Things can be
> learned from it, but it seems to be a unique snowflake relative to all the
> other projects I looked at...

That's fair enough.  What is needed for a particular scale may be
massive overkill for another.  All projects will probably be needing
to adopt different processes or tools as they grow.

Similar statements have made about whether startups or other small
projects should use Kubernetes[4].  Kubernetes was designed by Google
based on their learnings from their in-house cluster management
systems, borg.  But if you aren't running at that scale, it may have
more overhead and complexity than what really makes sense.  

[4] https://blog.porter.run/when-to-use-kubernetes-as-a-startup/

I'm reminded of a talk that given by an engineer from Alibaba at
LinuxCon China 2017 where he was bragging about how they had finally
achieved the scaling necessasry so they could support over a thousand
servers in a data center, and how this was an incredible achievement.

That was especially funny to me, since right about that time, Google
had just finished an engineering effort to scale our cluster
management software *down* to a O(thousand) servers, in order to
efficiently support "mini-clusters" that could be deployed in smaller
data centers various countries in Europe, Asia, etc.  :-)

And later, even *more* engineering work was needed to efficiently
support O(hundreds) servers for Stadia.

What works well at one scale, may not work well at others, either when
scaling up or scaling down.

Cheers,

					- Ted

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 4:16 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 09:58:48AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 9:41 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > But it's interesting the way the "Gods of BSD vs the rebel alliance"
> > > thing seems to have inverted itself. Getting stuff done in Linux these
> > > days is pretty hard; oh sure, I suppose if you whip off a patch fixing
> > > a typo in a comment or something, someone will just apply it. But if
> > > you want to do something substantial, you have to be willing to invest
> > > a lot of time and effort in shepherding it through the upstreaming
> > > process, which implies you've got to have resources backing that
> > > effort.....
> >
> > This matches my experience: Lots of gatekeepers, any one of which can
> take
> > a disliking to your submission for what, at times, seems like arbitrary
> and
> > capricious reasons. If you make it to the 'in crowd' it becomes more of a
> > rubber stamp at times...  I have recently been successful at submitting
> an
> > obvious fix to a tiny backwater area of the kernel without undue stress
> > though...  But I submitted it to the maintainer of the area, who then
> > submitted it to the 'greater maintainer', and then to the greater
> > maintainer and then to the tree. So my tiny fix has more Signed-off-by:
> > lines than lines of change and took about two weeks to make its way all
> the
> > way up into the repo...   For me, it took about 2x as long to prep and
> send
> > the change than it does for the direct commit access I have for FreeBSD,
> > but I've spent more than 10x on other submissions that ultimately didn't
> > make it in.
>
> I'll note that a lot of this is a matter of scale.  There are roughly
> 15,000 commits added to the Linux kernel per 9 week release cycle.
> That translates to roughly 10 commits per hour, 7 days a week, 24
> hours a day.
>

All of FreeBSD is right around 5-6 per hour: FreeBSD/ports is about 4 per
hour, FreeBSD/src is about 1 per hour FreeBSD's kernel is 1/2 per hour.
Docs is about 1/5/hr.

I'm surprised the commit rate to the Linux kernel is only 20x that of
FreeBSD's kernel and only about twice that of the whole FreeBSD project.


> From an upstream maintainer's perspective, what matters is whether a
> commit handled in time for it to make the next release train.  So
> whether it takes two days or two weeks to get a patch in the repo is
> not considered important.  What *is* important is that commits that
> are up for review before, say, at least two weeks before the opening
> of the merge window, are reviewed in time for them to be pulled into
> Linus's tree when the merge window next opens.  If it is an urgent bug
> fix, then it will be acted upon more expeditiously, but the reality is
> most users won't see it until the the fix is backported into the
> Long-Term Stable kernel that their distribution or product kernel is
> derived from.
>

I understand review. I have to do it on lots of other projects I contribute
to. However, there's a lot of inefficiency in how this task happens.


> For more substantial contributions, one of the reasons why there are
> so many gatekeepers is mainly due to the fact that we've had far too
> many cases of "drive-by contributions" where a company tries to dump a
> whole new file system, or massive changes to a large number of systems
> --- and then once the code lands in the tree, the developers vanish.
> And now we're left with the question of whether we just drop the
> subsystems, and screw-over the users who have started to depend on the
> new functionality.  This may be one of the places where the Linux
> culture of "thou shall never cause user-space visible regressions" has
> its downside --- it means that it's a lot harder to accept new
> functionality unless there is strong confidence that contributor is
> there for the long haul, and admittedly that's a lot easier if you are
> a member of the "in-crowd".
>

I understand why things were built, but that doesn't mean they are the
right solution to the problems the policies are trying to solve.


> > I looked into Linux's processes to improve FreeBSD's. And came to the
> > conclusion that in large part they succeed despite their processes, not
> > because of them. They have too much overhead, rely too much on magic bots
> > that are hard to replicate and I'm astonished that things work as well as
> > they do.
>
> I think that if you divide the total overhead by the number of commits
> that land in each release, the overhead isn't really that bad.  Sure,
> a tractor-trailer truck has a lot more overhead than say, a bicycle;
> but you can haul an awful lot more in a semi-trailer truck than you
> can in a bicycle rack.  Hence, the overhead of a semi is arguably much
> less, once you take into account how much you can fit in a
> tractor-trailer.
>

I feel like I've been hit by a tractor trailer when I try to contribute to
Linux sometimes... But the overhead is feels way higher than
other projects that are moving at the same order of magnitude as
the Linux kernel. I'd have expected the rate to be closer to 100/hr
or 1000/hr given the differential usage between it and FreeBSD...


> Also, it's actually not *that* expensive, even in absolute terms.  For
> example, I run about 26 hours worth of regression tests (using a dozen
> VM's, so the wall clock time is about 2 hours), using gce-xfstests[1],
> and the retail cost if I didn't have corporate sponsorship is less
> than $2 USD for a complete set of ext4 tests.  And I made a point of
> making well documented and easy for others to standup so they can test
> their own file systems if they want.  The reason why I did all of this
> packaging work was to try to get graduate students to understand how
> much work left to get a publishable file system, such as say
> BetrFS[3], into a production-ready state for real-world use.  :-)
>

Indeed. These sorts of tests are indeed a good thing, and are quite
a bit more extensive than similar projects I've contributed to.


> [1] https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests
> [2]
> https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/Documentation/gce-xfstests.md
> [3]
> https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast15/technical-sessions/presentation/jannen
>
>
> > It's a grown culture / process that relies on old tools mixed with
> > new in weird ways you'd never think of standing up today. Things can be
> > learned from it, but it seems to be a unique snowflake relative to all
> the
> > other projects I looked at...
>
> That's fair enough.  What is needed for a particular scale may be
> massive overkill for another.  All projects will probably be needing
> to adopt different processes or tools as they grow.
>
> Similar statements have made about whether startups or other small
> projects should use Kubernetes[4].  Kubernetes was designed by Google
> based on their learnings from their in-house cluster management
> systems, borg.  But if you aren't running at that scale, it may have
> more overhead and complexity than what really makes sense.
>
> [4] https://blog.porter.run/when-to-use-kubernetes-as-a-startup/
>
> I'm reminded of a talk that given by an engineer from Alibaba at
> LinuxCon China 2017 where he was bragging about how they had finally
> achieved the scaling necessasry so they could support over a thousand
> servers in a data center, and how this was an incredible achievement.
>
> That was especially funny to me, since right about that time, Google
> had just finished an engineering effort to scale our cluster
> management software *down* to a O(thousand) servers, in order to
> efficiently support "mini-clusters" that could be deployed in smaller
> data centers various countries in Europe, Asia, etc.  :-)
>

Indeed. Netflix has been operating a global video operation with
thousands of servers for many years now... Thought the problem
sets are different, and the non-video-serving folks use a lot more
in the cloud for all the data analysis...


> And later, even *more* engineering work was needed to efficiently
> support O(hundreds) servers for Stadia.
>
> What works well at one scale, may not work well at others, either when
> scaling up or scaling down.
>

Indeed. But one also should take a look at the overheads and inefficiencies,
or you run the risk that someone else will be able to operate at a similar
scale with less effort.
And it seems to me, as mostly an outsider, that the overheads might become
a bigger problem, especially if we have a prolonged downturn.  Just my
opinion,
though.

Warner


> Cheers,
>
>                                         - Ted
>

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Steve Nickolas]

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I guess this is the best place to jump in: I've been working for some time 
on a stupid idea, and it involves both the System V code (in the form of 
Solaris, although I've been attempting to theseus it out) and the BSDs.

One thing I've said a few times elsewhere is - if you want to do something 
daft, not only are you on your own, but people will actively not only 
dissuade but derail you from trying to do it.  I felt the best way to get 
what I wanted was to try to isolate the kernel and libc (and perhaps 
bootloader) from one of the BSDs and attempt to make them buildable 
through a system of plain makefiles, to integrate into the rest of my 
concept (this also includes, fwiw but unrelated, clang).  If you're 
familiar with Linux From Scratch - you can probably see what I'm doing, 
although it's not at all using the same code.  A lot of the time I keep 
running into "we don't want mere mortals working at this level" type 
responses.

Yeah, I know it's daft.  But I still want to do it. ;p

In fact, back in the Linux 2.4 days, I *had* a proof of concept.  But it 
ran on Linux and used a lot of "ersatz because copyright" which is no 
longer needed (e.g., because ksh and CDE weren't available).

I want my own flavor of Unix, basically... 🤪

The apparent death of System V is a double-edged sword for my idea.  It 
means it's all the more useless - but in becoming *useless*, it also 
ceases to be *pointless*, in my estimation.

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Thu, 19 Jan 2023, Dan Cross wrote:

> There were also a lot of gatekeepers. Perhaps not so much in CSRG, but
> certainly in the next tier out: if you weren't part of the in-crowd at
> USENIX and on USENET, it was hard to contribute. Ted has referred to
> this as kowtowing to the "Gods of BSD." He wasn't wrong, though I
> think the dynamic has changed substantially in recent years.

I feel like Bill Jolitz was a sort of Prometheus, with Jolix bringing BSD 
to the masses, when those who were Above®™© didn't take the 386 and 
commodity hardware seriously.

Jolix was a game-changer - though I feel it was like Banquo in the 
Scottish play®™© - "thou shalt get (beget) kings, though thou be none". 
Its descendants (especially FreeBSD and OpenBSD) have been more 
influential in the main than it was.

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Adam Thornton]

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The era of general-purpose computers won't end.

The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly
will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity,
general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to
do only one thing.

But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things.
Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations
controlling the society where the developers come from.  Some of them will
be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings.  Some will be
done by enthusiasts.  But I don't think we are too far from the world where
you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick
with a knife that's been in your family for generations.

But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was,
what, 1984?

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

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Bringing it back around to AIX, this may be a bit of a leading question, but for those who are more in the know than not on how AIX works, is there any chance there are little design nuggets hidden down in there that now, not being critical to an active IBM project, may find their way out there into the world?

This is kinda my latent curiosity with any of these commercial systems, if there's something absolutely amazing hiding down in one of the codebases just waiting to see the light of day in some post-commerical source release that might improve the situation out there in open source UNIX-like land. Some ideal SMP scheduler, quality drivers, etc.

Of course, the usefulness of any such thing would depend on any theoretical eventual license applied to a source code release. Something restrictive would prevent proliferation of a good idea, but in any case, there are so many lineages just ripe for plundering, and as time goes on, it becomes more likely those source codes will actually be accessible and licensed to allow that. Who knows though...

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> The era of general-purpose computers won't end.
>
> The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
>
> But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things. Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from. Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings. Some will be done by enthusiasts. But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
>
> But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Kevin Bowling]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:23 AM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> Bringing it back around to AIX, this may be a bit of a leading question, but for those who are more in the know than not on how AIX works, is there any chance there are little design nuggets hidden down in there that now, not being critical to an active IBM project, may find their way out there into the world?
>
> This is kinda my latent curiosity with any of these commercial systems, if there's something absolutely amazing hiding down in one of the codebases just waiting to see the light of day in some post-commerical source release that might improve the situation out there in open source UNIX-like land.  Some ideal SMP scheduler, quality drivers, etc.

There's definitely a lot of nice stuff in there, most "reviews" or
recollections of AIX distill down to "OMG ODM" and completely miss the
forest from the trees.  I've seen some data and I think AIX scales, at
least out of the box, much higher than Linux on massive CPU and NUMA
systems.  That may be a bit of a cause and effect, there's a
likelihood of someone buying a top range POWER system to run as a
single system image.

However OpenSolaris provides a sober analysis of what you are after:
1) how much work is involved in open sourcing a commercial UNIX.  The
then CEO blogged about how he had personal involvement to get it done,
and the high hurdle was lawyer work getting rights and approvals from
third parties to re-license everything.  AIX has, in addition to
whatever vestiges of Bell/AT&T code, Bull and Motorola code and
probably a lot of others (OSF, HP, Sun, etc are mentioned in the
copyrights on install) whose rights may not exist in any recognizable
form after 40 years.

2) how little is generally applicable outside a native environment.
In terms of code, the main contribution from Solaris today outside of
it is ZFS.  The ports are all a bit of a side car (even in Illumos),
Larry has pointed out on this list how hard they worked to get unified
memory in SunOS only to have that lost again by ZFS.

As some random anecdote, in FreeBSD there is a reference to Solaris
prior to OpenSolaris here
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sys/kern/subr_turnstile.c?id=961a7b244dbfc467c112b7a594825da8c0a41acf
and FreeBSD and macOS also use OpenBSM inspired by Sun.  The BSDs
occasionally share some code (usually drivers or higher level
subsystems like ufs or pf) but as time goes on it seems more
ideological than code since they have all drifted sufficiently from
one another.  So close study of any interesting AIX bits would be
about as useful as code for cross pollination.

On the other hand, source dumps are great for historical records and
study.  For instance, the heirloom tools
(https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html) came from the work
done to open Solaris.  If you get source control repos, it also gives
you a nice whodunit.

> Of course, the usefulness of any such thing would depend on any theoretical eventual license applied to a source code release.  Something restrictive would prevent proliferation of a good idea, but in any case, there are so many lineages just ripe for plundering, and as time goes on, it becomes more likely those source codes will actually be accessible and licensed to allow that.  Who knows though...
>
> - Matt G.
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The era of general-purpose computers won't end.
>
> The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
>
> But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things. Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from. Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings. Some will be done by enthusiasts. But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
>
> But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?
>
>

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Joseph Holsten]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023, at 11:07, Kevin Bowling wrote:

> However OpenSolaris provides a sober analysis of what you are after:
> 1) how much work is involved in open sourcing a commercial UNIX.  The
> then CEO blogged about how he had personal involvement to get it done,
> and the high hurdle was lawyer work getting rights and approvals from
> third parties to re-license everything.  AIX has, in addition to
> whatever vestiges of Bell/AT&T code, Bull and Motorola code and
> probably a lot of others (OSF, HP, Sun, etc are mentioned in the
> copyrights on install) whose rights may not exist in any recognizable
> form after 40 years.

This really reminds me how much I wish there was the equivalent of a probate process for intellectual property “end of life” situations. Registered marks demand the onus be upon the registrant to actively enforce the monopoly protection or they lose the protection. But if you found a created work, you have no way of finding out who has claims upon it. And at this point, almost nothing is “sold” under a license that retains the right of first sale, but licensed.

And the US hasn’t even gotten to the point where copy protected works expire their protection and we get to find out if it’s a DMCA violation to circumvent copy protection without an explicit grant from the Librarian of Congress. I mean, I know what 17USC§1201 seems to mean today, but who’s to know what those words will appear to have meant to their authors when interpreted many decades from now.

[TUHS] The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Bakul Shah]

On Jan 19, 2023, at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The era of general-purpose computers won't end.

What I meant is it will likely become much more
niche just like mainframe programming.

What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
few apps.

> The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
> 
> But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things.  Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from.  Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings.  Some will be done by enthusiasts.  But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
> 
> But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?

What I was reflecting on is there may not be a real
need for virtual memory if you are running just a few
apps and memory is plentiful!

We have relied on virtual memory for creating protection
boundaries but that has not been enough. In Unix a child
process has all the privileges a parent has. If instead the
permission model for a new process is to permit only what
it needs[1], including memory, you can get rid of containers
(such as docker) and jails (as on FreeBSD). What is more,
this can be done without virtual memory. Further, the same
model can be extended to distributed computing. If this
becomes reality, why wouldn't vendors go for that?

So yes, the hardware will be capable of general purpose
computing (Turing complete?) but will vendors allow access
to it?

[1] As Capability folks say, this is the Principle Of
Least Authority or POLA.

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Luther Johnson]

Computers that are not smart phone-like are definitely on the endangered 
species list. You know, the kind on  a desk, with  a keyboard ...

On 01/19/2023 01:01 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2023, at 9:19 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The era of general-purpose computers won't end.
> What I meant is it will likely become much more
> niche just like mainframe programming.
>
> What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
> do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
> desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
> few apps.
>
>> The problem is that a great many single-purpose items are (and increasingly will be), for reasons of scale/developer availability/familiarity, general-purpose computers that come from the factory supposedly packaged to do only one thing.
>>
>> But all of them will have brains that will let them do arbitrary things.  Some of these things will be done at the behest of the organizations controlling the society where the developers come from.  Some of them will be done at the behest of transnational organized crime rings.  Some will be done by enthusiasts.  But I don't think we are too far from the world where you can't trust your toothbrush unless you carved it yourself from a stick with a knife that's been in your family for generations.
>>
>> But really, this is all just "Reflections on Trusting Trust," which was, what, 1984?
> What I was reflecting on is there may not be a real
> need for virtual memory if you are running just a few
> apps and memory is plentiful!
>
> We have relied on virtual memory for creating protection
> boundaries but that has not been enough. In Unix a child
> process has all the privileges a parent has. If instead the
> permission model for a new process is to permit only what
> it needs[1], including memory, you can get rid of containers
> (such as docker) and jails (as on FreeBSD). What is more,
> this can be done without virtual memory. Further, the same
> model can be extended to distributed computing. If this
> becomes reality, why wouldn't vendors go for that?
>
> So yes, the hardware will be capable of general purpose
> computing (Turing complete?) but will vendors allow access
> to it?
>
> [1] As Capability folks say, this is the Principle Of
> Least Authority or POLA.
>
>
>

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[John Cowan]

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On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 5:23 PM Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com> wrote:

Computers that are not smart phone-like are definitely on the endangered
> species list. You know, the kind on  a desk, with  a keyboard ...
>

I don't have statistics for this, but I doubt it.  Consider amateur radio,
which has been around for a century now.  Amateur stations are an
ever-shrinking *fraction* of all transmitters, to say nothing of receivers,
but in absolute terms there are now more than 2 million hams in the world,
which is almost certainly more than ever.

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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Luther Johnson]

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Well, that's a comforting thought, I hope it goes that way.

On 01/19/2023 06:10 PM, John Cowan wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 5:23 PM Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com 
> <mailto:luther@makerlisp.com>> wrote:
>
>     Computers that are not smart phone-like are definitely on the
>     endangered
>     species list. You know, the kind on  a desk, with  a keyboard ...
>
>
> I don't have statistics for this, but I doubt it.  Consider amateur 
> radio, which has been around for a century now.  Amateur stations are 
> an ever-shrinking *fraction* of all transmitters, to say nothing of 
> receivers, but in absolute terms there are now more than 2 million 
> hams in the world, which is almost certainly more than ever.


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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[arnold]

Real computers with keyboards etc won't go away; think about
all those servers running the backends of the apps and the
databases for the cool stuff on the phones.  Someone is still
going to have to write those bits.

Arnold

Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com> wrote:

> Well, that's a comforting thought, I hope it goes that way.
>
> On 01/19/2023 06:10 PM, John Cowan wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 5:23 PM Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com 
> > <mailto:luther@makerlisp.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     Computers that are not smart phone-like are definitely on the
> >     endangered
> >     species list. You know, the kind on  a desk, with  a keyboard ...
> >
> >
> > I don't have statistics for this, but I doubt it.  Consider amateur 
> > radio, which has been around for a century now.  Amateur stations are 
> > an ever-shrinking *fraction* of all transmitters, to say nothing of 
> > receivers, but in absolute terms there are now more than 2 million 
> > hams in the world, which is almost certainly more than ever.
>

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Luther Johnson]

Yes, I know, but some of that SW development is being automated ... I'm 
not saying it will totally go away, but the numbers will become smaller, 
and the number of people who know how to do it will become smaller, and 
the quality will continue to deteriorate. The number of people who can 
detect quality problems before the failures they cause, will also get 
smaller. Not extinct, but endangered, and we are all endangered by the 
quality problems.

On 01/21/2023 11:12 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Real computers with keyboards etc won't go away; think about
> all those servers running the backends of the apps and the
> databases for the cool stuff on the phones.  Someone is still
> going to have to write those bits.
>
> Arnold
>
> Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com> wrote:
>
>> Well, that's a comforting thought, I hope it goes that way.
>>
>> On 01/19/2023 06:10 PM, John Cowan wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 5:23 PM Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com
>>> <mailto:luther@makerlisp.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>      Computers that are not smart phone-like are definitely on the
>>>      endangered
>>>      species list. You know, the kind on  a desk, with  a keyboard ...
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't have statistics for this, but I doubt it.  Consider amateur
>>> radio, which has been around for a century now.  Amateur stations are
>>> an ever-shrinking *fraction* of all transmitters, to say nothing of
>>> receivers, but in absolute terms there are now more than 2 million
>>> hams in the world, which is almost certainly more than ever.

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Rich Salz]

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> What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
> do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
> desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
> few apps.
>

So what.  How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.

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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Luther Johnson]

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I think development environments will follow the people onto their 
preferred platforms, and will change or adapt as necessary. So the kind 
of computing we are used to, with a "computer", may become more and more 
marginalized. Business will go where the numbers are, and what we think 
of as mainstream will become "retro" or "vintage". Most of my 
acquaintances who are 20 or 30 years younger than me, or my now-grown 
children, already think using a "computer" is kind of a "boomer" thing.

On 01/19/2023 03:29 PM, Rich Salz wrote:
>
>     What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
>     do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
>     desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
>     few apps.
>
>
> So what.  How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.


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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Luther Johnson]

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To be fair, one of my kids is an engineer, and definitely has several 
computers. But the others who are not, do not have personal computers, 
they have phones.

On 01/19/2023 03:39 PM, Luther Johnson wrote:
>
> I think development environments will follow the people onto their 
> preferred platforms, and will change or adapt as necessary. So the 
> kind of computing we are used to, with a "computer", may become more 
> and more marginalized. Business will go where the numbers are, and 
> what we think of as mainstream will become "retro" or "vintage". Most 
> of my acquaintances who are 20 or 30 years younger than me, or my 
> now-grown children, already think using a "computer" is kind of a 
> "boomer" thing.
>
> On 01/19/2023 03:29 PM, Rich Salz wrote:
>>
>>     What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
>>     do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
>>     desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
>>     few apps.
>>
>>
>> So what.  How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.
>


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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Jon Steinhart]

Rich Salz writes:
> > What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
> > do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
> > desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
> > few apps.
> >
>
> So what.  How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.

Probably not a lot, but having just finished diagnosing a failing
sensor in one of my heat pumps I'm one of them :-)

In my opinion, the biggest threat comes from folks like Apple who
are minimizing their use of off-the-shelf mass-market components.
Those won't be available if demand fades.  Just like with soldered-in
memory chips, we're lucky that we can still buy disk drives that work
with any system.

While I personally want to be able to decide how to handle stuff that
I own (another fading concept), my big concern is the long term effects
of making it harder for people to experiment and innovate.  Lack of
general purpose components or needing keys and licenses to tinker means
less tinkering which likely translates to less innovation which likely
translates to less long-term prosperity.

Jon

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

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In my mind there would probably be a strong correlation between engineers making products unnecessarily complicated (whether they want to or not) and end users deciding en masse not to sink the time into learning how to maintain increasingly convoluted and esoteric designs.

On the flip-side, a push towards modularity and maintainability would likely result in more folks feeling some confidence they can work on things themselves.

Long story short, computers aren't getting more complicated as a *result* of folks turning their nose up at maintenance, that's rather a symptom of the bigger planned obsolescence game. I highly doubt the number of people who would or wouldn't want to be able to fix something even occurs to the corporate overlords, they see dollar signs, not QoL for their customers.

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 2:29 PM, Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

>> What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
>> do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
>> desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
>> few apps.
>
> So what. How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.

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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Rich Salz]

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> In my mind there would probably be a strong correlation between engineers
> making products unnecessarily complicated (whether they want to or not) and
> end users deciding en masse not to sink the time into learning how to
> maintain increasingly convoluted and esoteric designs.
>

To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is that the Bell patent
office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff. I cannot imagine the
general populace doing that.

Folks on this list will be fine, there will always be programming
environments for us. For the rest of the world, simpler is better and
simpler isn't Unix.

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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS]

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To be fair I didn't necessarily just have UNIX in mind with that statement, I also mean whats happening to appliances, vehicles, etc. It's part of a bigger problem, we're just of course mostly discussing the implications of that problem vis-a-vis UNIX. Believe me, I also wish I could peer under the hood of a modern car and tell you how to actually replace something in there with just a socket and a set of pliers...

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 3:44 PM, Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

>> In my mind there would probably be a strong correlation between engineers making products unnecessarily complicated (whether they want to or not) and end users deciding en masse not to sink the time into learning how to maintain increasingly convoluted and esoteric designs.
>
> To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is that the Bell patent office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff. I cannot imagine the general populace doing that.
>
> Folks on this list will be fine, there will always be programming environments for us. For the rest of the world, simpler is better and simpler isn't Unix.

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[TUHS] owner maintenance (Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Charles H Sauer (he/him)]

Before Lions, before the Epoch even, there was Muir's Compleat Idiot 
manual 
(https://technologists.com/photos/1960s/fullsize/1969JohnMuir.jpg) which 
suited me well until it didn't. Charlie

On 1/19/2023 5:51 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> To be fair I didn't necessarily just have UNIX in mind with that 
> statement, I also mean whats happening to appliances, vehicles, etc. 
> It's part of a bigger problem, we're just of course mostly discussing 
> the implications of that problem vis-a-vis UNIX. Believe me, I also wish 
> I could peer under the hood of a modern car and tell you how to actually 
> replace something in there with just a socket and a set of pliers...
> 
> - Matt G.
> 
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 3:44 PM, Rich Salz 
> <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>>     In my mind there would probably be a strong correlation between
>>     engineers making products unnecessarily complicated (whether they
>>     want to or not) and end users deciding en masse not to sink the
>>     time into learning how to maintain increasingly convoluted and
>>     esoteric designs.
>>
>>
>> To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is that the Bell patent 
>> office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff. I cannot imagine 
>> the general populace doing that.
>>
>> Folks on this list will be fine, there will always be programming 
>> environments for us. For the rest of the world, simpler is better and 
>> simpler isn't Unix.
> 

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

[TUHS] Re: owner maintenance (Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Larry McVoy]

That book was AWESOME.  I'm pretty sure the intro talked about warming
up your VW and said "the time to roll a joint is just about long enough".

More seriously, I wish all manuals were written like that, I learned a
ton from that book.  The Honda one wasn't as good.

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 06:20:20PM -0600, Charles H Sauer (he/him) wrote:
> Before Lions, before the Epoch even, there was Muir's Compleat Idiot manual
> (https://technologists.com/photos/1960s/fullsize/1969JohnMuir.jpg) which
> suited me well until it didn't. Charlie
> 
> On 1/19/2023 5:51 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> >To be fair I didn't necessarily just have UNIX in mind with that
> >statement, I also mean whats happening to appliances, vehicles, etc. It's
> >part of a bigger problem, we're just of course mostly discussing the
> >implications of that problem vis-a-vis UNIX. Believe me, I also wish I
> >could peer under the hood of a modern car and tell you how to actually
> >replace something in there with just a socket and a set of pliers...
> >
> >- Matt G.
> >
> >------- Original Message -------
> >On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 3:44 PM, Rich Salz
> ><rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>    In my mind there would probably be a strong correlation between
> >>    engineers making products unnecessarily complicated (whether they
> >>    want to or not) and end users deciding en masse not to sink the
> >>    time into learning how to maintain increasingly convoluted and
> >>    esoteric designs.
> >>
> >>
> >>To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is that the Bell patent
> >>office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff. I cannot imagine
> >>the general populace doing that.
> >>
> >>Folks on this list will be fine, there will always be programming
> >>environments for us. For the rest of the world, simpler is better and
> >>simpler isn't Unix.
> >
> 
> -- 
> voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
> fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
> Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Yeechang Lee]

Rich Salz says:
> To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is that the Bell
> patent office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff.

I've similarly heard that Sun secretaries were pretty adept at using Emacs.

-- 
geo:37.783333,-122.416667

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[George Michaelson]

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Mike Lesk is interesting on this. He said to me that if you assume people
are idiots they learn to behave to your expectations and if you treat them
with the respect they deserve they grow. It was in the context of library
index systems and "do you want easy mode" clippy style vs terse but
functional.

Many specialist secretary roles in times past were simply underpaid subject
matter experts even on a typing pool. Huge amounts of expert knowledge.

The data entry staff at Edinburgh uni notoriously corrected student
programs doing cardpunch work.

There's no 'just' in women's work. As the Chinese maoist poster said:
"women hold up half the sky".

G

On Fri, 20 Jan 2023, 10:47 Yeechang Lee, <ylee@columbia.edu> wrote:

> Rich Salz says:
> > To me, the biggest surprise about Unix history is that the Bell
> > patent office secretaries were able to use ed and [nt]roff.
>
> I've similarly heard that Sun secretaries were pretty adept at using Emacs.
>
> --
> geo:37.783333,-122.416667
>

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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Rich Salz]

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:

> Mike Lesk is interesting on this. He said to me that if you assume people
> are idiots they learn to behave to your expectations and if you treat them
> with the respect they deserve they grow.
>

This is well-known in the fields of management and teaching.


> There's no 'just' in women's work. As the Chinese maoist poster said:
> "women hold up half the sky"
>

I never said women, I said secretaries.  Deliberately so.

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[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[George Michaelson]

>> There's no 'just' in women's work. As the Chinese maoist poster said: "women hold up half the sky"
>
>
> I never said women, I said secretaries.  Deliberately so.

I apologize Rich, I brought my own cultural interpretations to the
table. My fault.

_G

[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 5:30 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
>> do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
>> desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
>> few apps.
>
> So what.  How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.

I think that was Bakul's point: almost nobody does. Most folks could
be plopped down in front of a Chromebook or something and wouldn't be
seriously impeded with what they do. Before my mom died, I was
seriously considering setting something like that up for her.

In many ways that's also true of _most_ computers these days: that
desktop machine that lets you install whatever OS you want probably
has a little constellation of microcontrollers embedded in it that
come to life and do all sorts of stuff before the real cores ever come
out of reset (power sequencing, turning on DIMMs and the IO buses,
etc). What on earth are they running? Not to mention the megabytes of
firmware that run before the OS ever starts to do all sorts of stuff:
BAR assignment, DRAM training, all sorts of ACPI AML flows, running
firmware blobs from device ROMs, etc. By the time the kernel begins
execution, a lot of stuff we have no insight into whatsoever has
already run, and we're mostly powerless over that. A lot of that stays
resident and keeps running, even after the host OS takes over. SMM,
UEFI bits, all kinds of weird goo. Who's bit-banging I2C to talk to
the temperature and current meters on your DIMMs? The whole thing is
built to give the OS the illusion that it's in control, but really, it
isn't. Mothy Roscoe talked about this at length at OSDI'21:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote

That said, I don't think that general-purpose computers as we know
them will disappear. There will always be a need for, say, specialist
workstations for development or engineering or media editing or
whatever. On the other hand, when I was at Google I felt that the
powers that be were trying pretty hard to get most developers using a
cloud-based IDE-ish thing that was internal (and was remarkably good
for what it was). So maybe at some point "workstations" really will be
glorified 3270s talking to remote cloud services. At least until the
next cycle of moving away from centralized computing and pushing
compute out to autonomous edge devices kicks in.

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 02:43:53AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/

Just coincidentally, there is currently discussion in Linux kernel
circles about whether it's time to drop support for JFS.  JFS was
originally from OS/2 and then ported to Linux and AIX, although JFS
for Linux and JFS2 for AIX have diverged.  JFS has been in maintenance
mode in 2008, and the number of users is close to zero at this point.

     	      	      	     	      	       - Ted

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Kevin Bowling]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 2:20 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 02:43:53AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>
> Just coincidentally, there is currently discussion in Linux kernel
> circles about whether it's time to drop support for JFS.  JFS was
> originally from OS/2 and then ported to Linux and AIX, although JFS
> for Linux and JFS2 for AIX have diverged.  JFS has been in maintenance
> mode in 2008, and the number of users is close to zero at this point.
>
>                                                - Ted

I had really good experiences with that in the early to mid 2000s,
great performance and never lost data.  By the time ext4 came out it
was no longer much differentiated (extents) and the upgradability and
larger user base of ext4 made it obsolete.

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Jim Carpenter]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 4:20 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> Just coincidentally, there is currently discussion in Linux kernel
> circles about whether it's time to drop support for JFS.  JFS was
> originally from OS/2 and then ported to Linux and AIX, although JFS
> for Linux and JFS2 for AIX have diverged.  JFS has been in maintenance
> mode in 2008, and the number of users is close to zero at this point.

Well the original JFS was introduced with AIX 3.1 in 1990. A new JFS
started from that and was introduced with an OS/2 in 1999 and made
its way back to AIX.

From the 12/16/2002 JFS mini-FAQ:

Q1. What is the history of the source based use for the port of JFS for Linux.

A1. IBM introduced its UNIX file system as the Journaled File System (JFS)
    with the initial release of AIX Version 3.1.  This file system, now
    called JFS1 on AIX, has been the premier file system for AIX over the
    last 10 years and has been installed in millions of customer's AIX
    systems.  In 1995, work began to enhance the file system to be more
    scalable and to support machines that had more than one
    processor. Another goal was to have a more portable file system,
    capable of running on multiple operating systems.

    Historically, the JFS1 file system is very closely tied to the memory
    manager of AIX.  This design is typical of a closed-source operating
    system, or a file system supporting only one operating system.

    The new Journaled File System, on which the Linux port was based, was
    first shipped in OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness in April, 1999, after
    several years of designing, coding, and testing.  It also shipped with
    OS/2 Warp Client in October, 2000.  In parallel to this effort, some
    of the JFS development team returned to the AIX Operating System
    Development Group in 1997 and started to move this new JFS source base
    to the AIX operating system.  In May, 2001, a second journaled file
    system, Enhanced Journaled File System (JFS2), was made available for
    AIX 5L.  In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS
    source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.


Jim

[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Will Senn]

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On 1/18/23 3:43 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>
> FYI.
>
> Arnold
Now that we're all off on a slew of tangents, I thought I would point 
out that AIX wasn't really moved into maintenance mode in recent days. 
It's been there a while. What happened recently was the movement of the 
onshore contingent, offshore. Unless somebody has some inside 
information beyond the register article and its sources?

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[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Drew Diver]

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