Re: UNIX Compatibility

Theodore Tso
2011-05-24T13:06:33Z

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).

-- Ted