Digital Equipment Corp, Maynard, Massachusetts says that it will release a new version of OSF/1 in January 1994, followed by a new symmetric multiprocessing release in the second quarter. Although DEC takes a base version of the operating system from the Open Software Foundation, it adds its own tweaks and add-ons to it and numbers […]
Digital Equipment Corp, Maynard, Massachusetts says that it will release a new version of OSF/1 in January 1994, followed by a new symmetric multiprocessing release in the second quarter. Although DEC takes a base version of the operating system from the Open Software Foundation, it adds its own tweaks and add-ons to it and numbers its releases differently from those of the Software Foundation. DEC’s OSF/1 version 2.0 is claimed to comply with Posix 3.2 and conforms to the X/Opn Co Ltd Portability Guide release 4. It will also include C language functionality, and conform to the System V Interface Definition. This means that the Habitat optional layer, which sits on top of the OSF/1 kernel to provide an System V.4 personality, will now become a standard part of the operating system. As a result, when the symmetric multiprocessing version comes along, it will also be able to run System V.4 SMP applications. DEC says it did not go elsewhere for its symmetric multiprocessing technology, but simply developed the work it has already done on VMS and Ultrix. It also added that applications including threads will benefit in terms of performance from the threads built into both System V.4 and OSF/1.
