GC University, Faisalabad

Submitted to

SIR AMMAR

Submitted by

YAWAR ABBAS

Roll no

934

Semester

BS(CS)6th

Date

23-04-07

Topic

Unix

system

standards

UNIX systems
Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX) is a computer operating system originally
developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into
various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors
and non-profit organizations.
The present owner of the trademark UNIX is The Open Group, an industry standards
consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX
Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like").
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Unix's influence in academic circles led to largescale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University
of California, Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which is Sun
Microsystems. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems, Unix-like operating systems
such as Linux, Mac OS X and BSD derivatives are commonly encountered.
Sometimes, Traditional Unix may be used to describe a Unix or an operating system that
has the characteristics of either Version 7 Unix or UNIX System V.
Unix operating systems are widely used in both servers and workstations. The Unix
environment and the client-server program model were essential elements in the
development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks
rather than in individual computers.
Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to
government and academic institutions, causing both to be ported to a wider variety of
machine families than any other operating system. As a result, Unix became synonymous
with "open systems".
Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing
configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text
for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of interprocess communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of small programs
that can be strung together through a command line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to
using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These
concepts are known as the Unix philosophy.
Under Unix, the "operating system" consists of many of these utilities along with the
master control program, the kernel. The kernel provides services to start and stop
programs, handle the file system and other common "high level" tasks that most

programs share, and, perhaps most importantly, schedules access to hardware to avoid
conflicts if two programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously. To
mediate such access, the kernel was given special rights on the system and led to the
division between user-space and kernel-space.
The microkernel tried to reverse the growing size of kernels and return to a system in
which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a "normal"
computer consisted of a hard disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output
(I/O), the Unix file model worked quite well as most I/O was "linear". However, modern
systems include networking and other new devices. Describing a graphical user interface
driven by mouse control in an "event driven" fashion didn't work well under the old
model. Work on systems supporting these new devices in the 1980s led to facilities for
non-blocking I/O, forms of inter-process communications other than just pipes, as well as
moving functionality such as network protocols out of the kernel

Standards
Beginning in the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known
as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX
around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system,
publishing the first POSIX standard in 1988. At around the same time a separate but very
similar standard, the Single UNIX Specification, was also produced by the Open Group.
Starting in 1998 these two standards bodies began work on merging the two standards,
and they are now identical.
In an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's
Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as standard for binary and object code files. The
common format allows substantial binary compatibility among Unix systems operating
on the same CPU architecture.
The directory layout of some systems, particularly on Linux, is defined by the Filesystem
Hierarchy Standard. This type of standard however is controversial, and even within the
Linux community its adoption is far from universal.

POSIX
POSIX or "Portable Operating System Interface"[1] is the collective name of a family of
related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface
(API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system. Originally, the
name stood for IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, which as the name suggests, was released in 1988.
The family of POSIX standards is formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the
international standard name is ISO/IEC 9945. The standards emerged from a project that
began near 1985. The term POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman in response to an
IEEE request for a memorable name[1]; before that the standards effort was called IEEEIX.

POSIX specifies the user and software interfaces to the OS in some 15 different
documents. The standard user command line and scripting interface was based on the
Korn shell. Other user-level programs, services and utilities include awk, echo, ed, and
hundreds of others. Required program-level services include basic I/O (file, terminal, and
network) services. POSIX also defines a standard threading library API which is
supported by most modern operating systems.
Currently POSIX documentation is divided in three parts:

POSIX Kernel APIs (which include extensions for POSIX.1, Real-time Services,
Threads Interface, Real-time Extensions, Security Interface, Network File Access
and Network Process-to-Process Communications)
POSIX Commands and Utilities (with User Portability Extensions, Corrections
and Extensions, Protection and Control Utilities and Batch System Utilities)
POSIX Conformance Testing

A test suite for POSIX accompanies the standard. It is called PCTS or the POSIX
Conformance Test Suite[2].
Since the IEEE charges very high rates for POSIX documentation and does not allow online publication of the standards, there has been a tendency toward the "Single UNIX
Specification" standard, which is open, accepts input from anyone, and is freely available
on the Internet. Beginning in 1998 a joint working group, the Austin Group, began to
develop a combined standard that would be known as the Single UNIX Specification
Version 3[3].
Although used mainly for Unix systems, the POSIX standard can apply to any operating
system.

Fully POSIX-compliant
These are POSIX compatible, they conform to it fully.

A/UX
BlagOS
BSD/OS [4]
Cygwin - enables POSIX compliance for certain Microsoft Windows products.
AIX
HP-UX
velOSity
INTEGRITY
Irix
LynxOS
Mac OS X
Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX 3.5 - enables POSIX compliance for
certain Microsoft Windows products.

MINIX
OpenVMS
penOS
QNX
RTEMS (POSIX 1003.1-2003 Profile 52)
Solaris
o OpenSolaris
UnixWare
VxWorks
NT kernel (used in Windows NT, 2000, 2003; XP, Vista)
o Windows NT (except optional POSIX features) [5]
o Windows 2000 Server or Professional with Service Pack 3 or later (When
using Microsoft SFU 3.5). To be POSIX compliant, one must activate
optional features of Windows NT and Windows Server. [6]
o Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 or later (When using
Microsoft SFU 3.5)
o Windows Server 2003 (When using Microsoft Windows Services for
UNIX 3.5)
o Windows Vista (the Enterprise and Ultimate editions include a Subsystem
for UNIX-based Applications)

Vendors:

Berkeley Software Design

Digital Equipment Corporation
Hewlett-Packard
IBM
MIPS Technologies, Inc.
Novell, Inc.
Santa Cruz Operation
Silicon Graphics
Sun Microsystems, Inc

References:
1. Ritchie, Dennis M.. Space Travel: Exploring the solar system and the PDP-7.
Retrieved on 2007-03-11.
2. ^ http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/pdp7.html
3. ^ "UNIX". The Computer Chronicles. 1985.
4. ^
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.questions/browse_frm/thread/2f0b5e7
19fa3a3ec/3fa5e5fe4d58f96b
5. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.std.unix/msg/c9974cf0022884f8
6. ^ Stephen Shankland (December 7, 2005). Itanium: A cautionary tale. Tech News.
ZDNet. Retrieved on 2006-10-04. In the third quarter of this year, 7,845 Itanium
servers were sold, according to research by Gartner. That compares with 62,776
machines with Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, 31,648 with IBM's Power, and
9,147 with HP's PA-RISC.
7. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.std.unix/msg/c9974cf0022884f8
8. ^ http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/1995/09/pr95220.html
9. ^ Apple Computer, Inc. Leopard Technology Overview. Leopard Technology
Series for Developers. Retrieved on 2006-10-24. Apple will submit Leopard and
Leopard Server to The Open Group for certification against the UNIX 03 product
standard.