 | |
| Developer | AT&T Corporation |
|---|---|
| Written in | C |
| OS family | Unix |
| Working state | Historic |
| Source model | Closed source except forOpenSolaris and its derivatives |
| Initial release | 1983; 42 years ago (1983)[1] |
| Available in | English |
| Default user interface | Command-line interface |
| Preceded by | UNIX System III |
| Succeeded by | UnixWare |
Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of theUnixoperating system. It was originally developed byAT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4 (SVR4) was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed asUnix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated toSysV.
As of 2021[update], the AT&T-derived Unix market is divided between four System V variants:IBM'sAIX,Hewlett Packard Enterprise'sHP-UX andOracle'sSolaris,[2] plus the free-softwareillumos forked fromOpenSolaris.
System V was the successor to 1982'sUNIX System III. While AT&T developed and sold hardware that ran System V, most customers ran a version from a reseller, based on AT&T'sreference implementation. A standards document called theSystem V Interface Definition outlined the default features and behavior of implementations.
During the formative years of AT&T's computer business, the division went through several phases of System V software groups, beginning with the Unix Support Group (USG), followed by Unix System Development Laboratory (USDL), followed by AT&T Information Systems (ATTIS), and finallyUnix System Laboratories (USL).
In the 1980s and early-1990s, UNIX System V and theBerkeley Software Distribution (BSD) were the two major versions of UNIX. Historically, BSD was also commonly called "BSD Unix" or "Berkeley Unix".[3]Eric S. Raymond summarizes the longstanding relationship and rivalry between System V and BSD during the early period:[4]
In fact, for years after divestiture the Unix community was preoccupied with the first phase of theUnix wars – an internal dispute, the rivalry between System V Unix and BSD Unix. The dispute had several levels, some technical (sockets vs.streams, BSD tty vs. System V termio) and some cultural. The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs;programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V.
While HP, IBM and others chose System V as the basis for their Unix offerings, other vendors such asSun Microsystems andDEC extended BSD. Throughout its development, though, System V was infused with features from BSD, while BSD variants such as DEC'sUltrix received System V features. AT&T and Sun Microsystems worked together to merge System V with BSD-basedSunOS to produceSolaris, one of the primary System V descendants still in use today[when?]. Since the early 1990s, due to standardization efforts such asPOSIX and the success ofLinux, the division between System V and BSD has become less important.
System V, known inside Bell Labs as Unix 5.0, succeeded AT&T's previous commercial Unix calledSystem III in January, 1983.[5]Unix 4.0 was never released externally, which would have been designated as System IV.[6][7][8]This first release of System V (called System V.0, System V Release 1, or SVR1) was developed by AT&T's UNIX Support Group (USG) and based on the Bell Labs internal USG UNIX 5.0.
System V also included features such as thevi editor andcurses from 4.1 BSD, developed at theUniversity of California, Berkeley; it also improved performance by adding buffer andinode caches. It also added support forinter-process communication using messages,semaphores, andshared memory, developed earlier for the Bell-internalCB UNIX.[9]
SVR1 ran onDECPDP-11 andVAXminicomputers.
AT&T's UNIX Support Group (USG) transformed into the UNIX System Development Laboratory (USDL), which released System V Release 2 in 1984. SVR2 addedshell functions and theSVID. SVR2.4 addeddemand paging,copy-on-write,shared memory, and record andfile locking.
The concept of the "porting base" was formalized, and the DECVAX-11/780 was chosen for this release. The "porting base" is the so-called original version of a release, from which all porting efforts for other machines emanate.
Educational source licenses for SVR2 were offered by AT&T for US$800 for the first CPU, and $400 for each additional CPU. A commercial source license was offered for $43,000, with three months of support, and a $16,000 price per additional CPU.[10]
Apple Computer'sA/UX operating system was initially based on this release.SCO XENIX also used SVR2 as its basis. The first release ofHP-UX was also an SVR2 derivative.[11]: 33
Maurice J. Bach's book,The Design of the UNIX Operating System, is the definitive description of the SVR2 kernel.[12]
AT&T's UNIX System Development Laboratory (USDL) was succeeded by AT&T Information Systems (ATTIS), which distributed UNIX System V, Release 3, in 1987.[13] SVR3 includedSTREAMS,Remote File Sharing (RFS), the File System Switch (FSS)virtual file system mechanism, a restricted form ofshared libraries, and theTransport Layer Interface (TLI) networkAPI. The final version was Release 3.2 in 1988, which added binary compatibility toXenix on Intel platforms (seeIntel Binary Compatibility Standard).
User interface improvements included the "layers" windowing system for theDMD 5620 graphics terminal, and the SVR3.2curses libraries that offered eight or more color pairs and other at this time important features (forms, panels, menus, etc.). TheAT&T 3B2 became the official "porting base."
SCO UNIX was based upon SVR3.2, as wasISC386/ix. Among the more obscure distributions of SVR3.2 for the 386 were ESIX 3.2 byEverex and "System V, Release 3.2" sold by Intel themselves; these two shipped "plain vanilla" AT&T's codebase.[14]
IBM'sAIX operating system is an SVR3 derivative.
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System V Release 4.0 was announced on October 18, 1988[15] and was incorporated into a variety of commercial Unix products from early 1989 onwards.[5] A joint project of AT&T Unix System Laboratories andSun Microsystems, it combined technology from:
New features included:
Many companies licensed SVR4 and bundled it with computer systems such asworkstations andnetwork servers. SVR4 systems vendors includedAtari (Atari System V),Commodore (Amiga Unix),Data General (DG/UX),Fujitsu (UXP/DS),Hitachi (HI-UX), Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX),NCR (Unix/NS),NEC (EWS-UX, UP-UX, UX/4800,SUPER-UX),OKI (OKI System V),Pyramid Technology (DC/OSx),SGI (IRIX),Siemens (SINIX),Sony (NEWS-OS),Sumitomo Electric Industries (SEIUX), andSun Microsystems (Solaris) withillumos in the 2010s as the onlyopen-source platform.
Software porting houses also sold enhanced and supportedIntel x86 versions. SVR4 software vendors includedDell (Dell UNIX),[17]Everex (ESIX), Micro Station Technology (SVR4),Microport (SVR4), and UHC (SVR4).[18]
The primary platforms for SVR4 were Intel x86 andSPARC; the SPARC version, called Solaris 2 (or, internally,SunOS 5.x), was developed by Sun. The relationship between Sun and AT&T was terminated after the release of SVR4, meaning that later versions of Solaris did not inherit features of later SVR4.x releases. Sun would in 2005 release most of the source code for Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) as theopen-sourceOpenSolaris project, creating, with its forks, the only open-source (albeit heavily modified) System V implementation available. AfterOracle took over Sun, Solaris wasforked into proprietary release, butillumos as the continuation project is being developed in open-source.
A consortium of Intel-based resellers includingUnisys,ICL,NCR Corporation, andOlivetti developed SVR4.0MP withmultiprocessing capability (allowing system calls to be processed from any processor, but interrupt servicing only from a "master" processor).[19]
Release 4.1 ES (Enhanced Security) added security features required forOrange Book B2 compliance andAccess Control Lists and support for dynamic loading of kernel modules.[20][21]
In 1992, AT&T USL engaged in a joint venture withNovell, calledUnivel. That year saw the release System V.4.2 as UnivelUnixWare, featuring theVeritas File System. Other vendors included UHC and Consensys. Release 4.2MP, completed late 1993, added support for multiprocessing and it was released as UnixWare 2 in 1995.[22]
Eric S. Raymond warned prospective buyers about SVR4.2 versions, as they often did not include on-lineman pages. In his 1994 buyers guide, he attributes this change in policy to Unix System Laboratories.[23]
TheSanta Cruz Operation (SCO), owners of Xenix, eventually acquired the UnixWare trademark and the distribution rights to the System V Release 4.2 codebase from Novell, while other vendors (Sun, IBM, HP) continued to use and extend System V Release 4. Novell transferred ownership of the Unix trademark toThe Open Group.
System V Release 5 was developed in 1997 by theSanta Cruz Operation (SCO) as a merger ofSCO OpenServer (an SVR3-derivative) and UnixWare, with a focus on large-scale servers.[11]: 23, 32 It was released as SCO UnixWare 7. SCO's successor,The SCO Group, also basedSCO OpenServer 6 on SVR5, but the codebase is not used by any other major developer or reseller.
System V Release 6 was announced by SCO to be released by the end of 2004, but was apparently cancelled.[24] It was supposed to support 64-bit systems.[25] SCO also introduced Smallfoot in 2004, a low-resource "embeddable" variant of UnixWare for dedicated commercial and industrial applications, in an attempt that was perceived as a response to the growing popularity of Linux.[26] The industry has since coalesced aroundThe Open Group's Single UNIX Specification version 3 (UNIX 03).
In the 1980s and 1990s, a variety of SVR4 versions of Unix were available commercially for the x86 PC platform. However, the market for commercial Unix on PCs declined afterLinux and BSD became widely available. In late 1994,Eric S. Raymond discontinued hisPC-clone UNIX Software Buyer's Guide onUSENET, stating, "The reason I am dropping this is that I run Linux now, and I no longer find the SVr4 market interesting or significant."[27]
In 1998, aconfidential memo at Microsoft stated, "Linux is on track to eventually own the x86 UNIX market", and further predicted, "I believe that Linux – moreso thanNT – will be the biggest threat to SCO in the near future."[28]
AnInfoWorld article from 2001 characterized SCO UnixWare as having a "bleak outlook" due to being "trounced" in the market by Linux and Solaris, and IDC predicted that SCO would "continue to see a shrinking share of the market".[29]
Project Monterey was started in 1998 to combine major features of existing commercial Unix platforms, as a joint project ofCompaq, IBM, Intel, SCO, andSequent Computer Systems. The target platform was meant to be Intel's newIA-64 architecture andItanium line of processors. However, the project was abruptly canceled in 2001 after little progress.[30]
By 2001, several major Unix variants such as SCO UnixWare, CompaqTru64 UNIX, and SGI IRIX were all in decline.[29] The three major Unix versions doing well in the market were IBM AIX, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, and Sun's Solaris.[29]
In 2006, when SGI declared bankruptcy, analysts questioned whether Linux would replace proprietary Unix altogether. In a 2006 article written forComputerworld by Mark Hall, the economics of Linux were cited as a major factor driving the migration from Unix to Linux:[31]
Linux's success in high-end,scientific andtechnical computing, like Unix's before it, preceded its success in yourdata center. Once Linux proved itself by executing the most complex calculations possible, IT managers quickly grasped that it could easilyserve Web pages and runpayroll. Naturally, it helps to be lucky: Free, downloadable Linux's star began to rise during one of the longest downturns in IT history. With companies doing more with less, one thing they could dump was Unix.
The article also cites trends in high-performance computing applications as evidence of a dramatic shift from Unix to Linux:[31]
A look at theTop500 list ofsupercomputers tells the tale best. In 1998, Unix machines from Sun and SGI combined for 46% of the 500 fastest computers in the world. Linux accounted for one (0.2%). In 2005, Sun had 0.8% — or four systems — and SGI had 3.6%, while 72% of the Top500 ran Linux.
In a November 2015 survey of the top 500 supercomputers, Unix was used by only 1.2% (all running IBM AIX), while Linux was used by 98.8%; the same survey in November 2017 reports 100% of them using Linux.[32]
System V derivatives continued to be deployed on some proprietary server platforms. The principal variants of System V that remain in commercial use are AIX (IBM), Solaris (Oracle), and HP-UX (HP). According to a study done byIDC, in 2012 the worldwide Unix market was divided between IBM (56%), Oracle (19.2%), and HP (18.6%). No other commercial Unix vendor had more than 2% of the market.[2] Industry analysts generally characterize proprietary Unix as having entered a period of slow but permanent decline.[33]
OpenSolaris and its derivatives are the only SVR4 descendants that areopen-source software. Core system software continues to be developed asillumos used inillumos distributions such asSmartOS,Omniosce,OpenIndiana and others.
The System V interprocess communication mechanisms are available in Unix-like operating systems not derived from System V; in particular, in Linux[9][34] (a reimplementation of Unix) as well as the BSD derivativeFreeBSD.[35] POSIX 2008 specifies a replacement for these interfaces.[9]
FreeBSD maintains a binary compatibility layer for theCOFF format, which allows FreeBSD to execute binaries compiled for some SVR3.2 derivatives such as SCO UNIX and Interactive UNIX.[36] Modern System V, Linux, and BSD platforms use theELF file format for natively compiled binaries.
There was no System IV.
Whatever happened to System IV is one of the great unsolved mysteries of computer science.
svipc(7) – Linux Programmer'sManual – Overview, Conventions and Miscellaneamsgsnd(2) – FreeBSD System CallsManual| Research |
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