Re: UNIX Compatibility

Michael Witten
2011-05-24T13:55:04Z

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 13:06, Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 7:49 AM, Richard Yao wrote:
>
>> I know that the system call codes used by Linux are not 100% UNIX
>> compatible. Is there anything else in the kernel that is not UNIX
>> compatible? Would modifying these things for UNIX compatibility break
>> anything in userland provided that it is recompiled against the
>> modified sources?
>
> What do you mean by "UNIX compatible?"  API compatibility?
> ABI compatibility?   Which Unix?  Solaris and HPUX and AIX
> are systems which are allowed to use the Unix(tm) trademark,
> but them are not compatible with each other.
>
> So the question you are asking is not well defined.
>
> Also, why are you asking it?   What problem are you trying to solve?
> At this point, Linux is running on far more servers than any of the
> Legacy Unix systems out there, and the ones which are still in
> development (i.e., Solaris and AIX) are have recently been worrying
> about adding Linux compatibility layers (usually at the API level).

Surely something as precarious as hegemony is nothing to boast about.