*BSD News Article 28065


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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: Notes on the *new* FreeBSD V1.1 VM system
Date: 4 Mar 1994 05:48:39 GMT
Organization: Weber State University, Ogden, UT
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <2l6i3n$rco@u.cc.utah.edu>
References: <2l0b06$2qi@GRAPEVINE.LCS.MIT.EDU> <2l1ov4$m7o@germany.eu.net> <2l2mmf$me9@GRAPEVINE.LCS.MIT.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.weber.edu

In article <2l2mmf$me9@GRAPEVINE.LCS.MIT.EDU> wollman@ginger.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) writes:
>In all seriousness, a POSIX-compliant operating system MUST NOT
>require programs to call non-POSIX functions in order to operate
>correctly according to the standard.  Therefore, vfork() isn't a
>solution to the problem of `60-Mb process forks in order to exec
>/bin/true'.

But POSIX is missing many pieces.  Like support for file truncation via
truncate/ftruncate/fcntl( ..., F_FREESP, ...) (the last is a SVR4ism and
more likely to make it into POSIX because of that).

POSIX is also missing support for proxy record locking, necessary for
the implementation of an NFS lockd.

Basically, POSIX is not the end-all, be-all of operating systems that
it was supposed to be.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.