The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
[previous article]The Sun workstations within the ECN will be playing a new tune in the near future. They'll be playing SunOS 4.0, the latest release of Sun's operating system. With this new operating system, you'll be seeing a number of new features and enhancements become available to the Sun user.
Among the biggest changes you'll see in SunOS 4.0 is Sun's reworking of the virtual memory system internal to UNIX. Their work promotes a greater degree of resource sharing and has improved memory usage for all programs compiled under SunOS 4.0. At the same time, they have allowed all pre-SunOS 4.0 binaries to run without modification.
Programs compiled under SunOS 4.0 are smaller. Sun now uses a concept called shared libraries. This means that a single copy of a commonly used routine, such as the C language, printf, will be shared between programs using that routine. This technique reduces the overall memory requirements for large programs. User's can build their own shared libraries if needed.
Another major undertaking Sun has done in this release is to reorganize the layout of the file system. All user's home directories have been moved to /home/SERVER/USER, where SERVER is replaced by the name of the file server your files live on and USER is replaced by your login name. For example, if your home directory was /usr/harbor/mckay it will become, /home/harbor/mckay under SunOS 4.0. Other changes have occurred as well. These primarily effect the administration of a Sun file server, making it easier for us to maintain the systems.
If you look in /home on a machine running SunOS 4.0, you'll notice that all of the user file systems on all of the ECN's Suns are listed. This is the visible part of a new feature called automount. With automount all of the file systems available on the ECN Sun file servers are available to all Sun users. The file systems are automatically mounted when you reference a file on them and automatically unmounted when you finish. This powerful feature allows you to easily share files between users on different file servers without having to copy the files or constantly have an extra file system mounted on your own workstation. We are also making use of this facility to automatically mount a copy of the on-line manual pages on your workstation when you use the help or man commands. The manual pages are obtained from the least loaded Sun file server.
The new release also has a number of less exciting changes. A new command, called crontab, allows users to have their own jobs run automatically. A newer release of suntools adds pull-right menus. These menus make it quicker to select items and provide a greater number of selections. A new mailtool is also included.
For the Sun programmer there are a few noteworthy features as well. Processes can now have as many as 64 files open at one time. The System V stream I/O system is now used for terminal I/O and complete stream library is available. A library providing support for lightweight processes is included in this release. A lightweight process allows for multiple execution threads within a single program.
On the whole, SunOS 4.0 provides many new and useful features for the Sun user, programmer and administrator. We think you'll agree that SunOS 4.0 is a step forward.
HTML