Date: Tue Aug 15 15:14:00 EDT 1995
X-Version: 2.9

6.8)  Unix glossary.

      This section provides short definitions of various concepts and
      components of (or related to) Unix systems.

      Chorus: message-passing microkernel, may form basis for a future release
         of SV.  Chorus already have SVR4 running on top (binary-compatible).

      CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).

      COSE (Common Open Software Environment) [Sun, HP, IBM]: common look and
         feel (Motif -- Sun will let OpenLook fade away), common API.
         Reaction against Windows NT. See section 6.4 above.

      DCE (Distributed Computing Environment, from OSF): Includes RPC (Apollo's
         NCS), directory service (local based on DNS, global on X.500), time,
         security, and threads services, DFS (distrib. file system), ....
         OS-independent.

      DME (Distributed Management Environment, from OSF):  future.

      DO (Distributed Objects [Enterprise]): ???.

      FFS (Fast File System): from Berkeley, 1983.  Equivalent (exact?) of
         UFS in SunOS.  Has notions such as cylinder groups, fragments.

      FSF (Free Software Foundation)

      Mach: modern kernels from CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) on which many
         Unices and other OSs are based (e.g. OSF/1, MacMach, ...):
         - 2.5: monolithic kernel with 4.2BSD
         - 3.0: microkernel with BSD Unix server in user space (and other OSs,
           e.g. MS-DOS)
         Newsgroup: comp.os.mach

      MFS (Memory File System):

      NeWS (Network extensible Window System), from Sun?: PostScript-based,
         networked, toolkits (and even clients) loaded in server.  Part of
         OpenWindows.

      NFS (Network File System):  contributed by Sun to BSD, stateless server

      ONC (Open Network Computing): from Sun(?), includes RPC, name service
         (NIS aka YP), NFS, ... (found in many Unices, other OSs).

      OpenStep [NeXT, Sun]: ???

      PowerOpen: both a standard, and an organization promoting PowerPC.
         Involves IBM, Apple and Motorola; others? See section 6.4 above.

      PowerPC (PPC): a RISC CPU chip [IBM, Motorola].

      RFS (Remote File System):  SV, stateful server, incompatible with NFS

      RPC (Remote Procedure Call): high-level IPC (inter-process communication)
         mechanism.  Two flavors.
         - ONC: Over TCP or UDP (later OSI), uses XDR to encode data.
         - DCE: has a different RPC mechanism (based on Apollo's NCS)

      S5 FS:  System V's native file system, blocks 512 to 2K.

      sockets:  BSD interface mechanism to networks (compare TLI).

      STREAMS:  a message-passing kernel mechanism, initially in SVR3, which
         provides a very good interface for protocol development.

      TFS (Translucent File System): Sun, COW applied to files.

      TLI (Transport Library Interface):  SV's interface to transport services
         (TCP, OSI).  UI has also defined an APLI (ACSE/Presentation Library
         Interface)

      UFS (?): BSD's native file system as seen in SunOS, blocks 4K to 8K,
         cylinder groups, fragments.

      XTI (X/Open Transport Interface):  TLI with enhancements

      X11: pixel-oriented window system from MIT.

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End of unix/faq Digest part 6 of 7
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-- 
Ted Timar - tmatimar@isgtec.com
ISG Technologies Inc., 6509 Airport Road, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L4V 1S7