Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment

ptg10805159

Section 2.3 UNIX System Implementations 33

The effect of the POSIX.1 FIPS was to requireany vendor that wished to sell

POSIX.1-compliant computer systems to the U.S. government to support some of the

optional features of POSIX.1. The POSIX.1 FIPS has since been withdrawn, so we won’t

consider it further in this text.

2.3 UNIX System Implementations

The previous section described ISO C, IEEE POSIX, and the Single UNIX

Specification — three standards originally created by independent organizations.

Standards, however,are interface specifications. How do these standards relate to the

real world? These standards aretaken by vendors and turned into actual

implementations. In this book, we areinterested in both these standards and their

implementation.

Section 1.1 of McKusick et al.[ 1996 ]gives a detailed history (and a nice picture) of

the UNIX System family tree. Everything starts from the Sixth Edition( 1976 ) and

Seventh Edition( 1979 )of the UNIX Time-Sharing System on the PDP-11 (usually called

Version 6 and Version 7, respectively). These werethe first releases widely distributed

outside of Bell Laboratories. Three branches of the tree evolved.

1. One at AT&T that led to System III and System V,the so-called commercial
   versions of the UNIX System.


2. One at the University of California at Berkeley that led to the 4.xBSD
   implementations.


3. Theresearch version of the UNIX System, developed at the Computing Science
   Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories, that led to the UNIX Time-Sharing
   System 8th Edition, 9th Edition, and ended with the 10th Edition in 1990.

2.3.1 UNIX System V Release 4

UNIX System V Release 4(SVR4)was a product of AT&T’s UNIX System Laboratories

(USL, formerly AT&T’s UNIX SoftwareOperation). SVR4 merged functionality from

AT&T UNIX System V Release 3.2(SVR3.2),the SunOS operating system from Sun

Microsystems, the 4.3BSD release from the University of California, and the Xenix

system from Microsoft into one coherent operating system. (Xenix was originally

developed from Version 7, with many features later taken from System V.) The SVR4

source code was released in late 1989, with the first end-user copies becoming available

during 1990. SVR4 conformed to both the POSIX 1003.1 standardand the X/Open

Portability Guide, Issue 3(XPG3).

AT&T also published the System V Interface Definition (SVID) [AT&T 1989].

Issue 3 of the SVID specified the functionality that an operating system must offer to

qualify as a conforming implementation of UNIX System V Release 4. As with POSIX.1,

the SVID specified an interface, not an implementation. No distinction was made in the

SVID between system calls and library functions. The reference manual for an actual

implementation of SVR4 must be consulted to see this distinction [AT&T 1990e].