DG/UX is a discontinued

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

developed by

Data General Data General Corporation was an early minicomputer firm formed in 1968. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer intended to ...

for its Eclipse MV

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

line, and later the AViiON

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

and

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides requested information for other programs or devices, called clients. Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending custome ...

line (both

Motorola 88000 The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. Due to the late start and extensive delays ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

IA-32 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called ''i386'') is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the i386, 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarn ...

-based variants).

Overview

DG/UX 1.00, released in March, 1985, was based on

UNIX System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

Release 2 with additions from 4.1BSD. By 1987, DG/UX 3.10 had been released, with

4.2BSD The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and released it as BSD to ...

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

networking, NFS and the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

included. DG/UX 4.00, in 1988, was a comprehensive re-design of the system, based on

System V Release 3 Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

, and supporting symmetric multiprocessing on the Eclipse MV. The 4.00 filesystem was based on the AOS/VS II filesystem and, using the logical disk facility, could span multiple disks. DG/UX 5.4, released around 1991, replaced the legacy Unix file buffer cache with unified, demand paged virtual memory management. Later versions were based on

System V Release 4 Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

. On the AViiON, DG/UX supported

multiprocessor Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

machines at a time when most variants of Unix did not. The operating system was also more complete than some other Unix variants; for example, the operating system included a full C compiler ( gcc) and also a logical volume manager. The OS was small and compact, but rich in features. It was simple and easy to install and did not require vast resources of memory or processing power. For example, a six-way

Pentium Pro The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It implements the P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686), and was the first x86 Intel C ...

-based AViiON would support several hundred users using

text terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...

s. The

volume manager In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, ...

built into the OS was simple, but very powerful. All disk administration could be performed online, without taking any file system offline. This included extending, relocating, mirroring or shrinking. The same functions could be performed on the swap area, allowing in-place migrations of disk storage without downtime. DG/UX 5.4 supported filesystem shrinking, "split mirror" online backup, filesystems up to 2 TB, and filesystem journaling in 1991. Few vendors offered similar features at that time. DG/UX had a high-performance and stable clustered filesystem. The

Clariion Clariion (styled CLARiiON) is a discontinued SAN disk array manufactured and sold by EMC Corporation, it occupied the entry-level and mid-range of EMC's SAN disk array products. In 2011, EMC introduced the EMC VNX Series, designed to replace both ...

storage

NAS Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones. Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to: Aviation * Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea * National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia ** Nas Air (S ...

was connected by high-voltage

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

controllers, and SCSI hubs. Each server had double SCSI controllers for failover reasons. Both controllers were master on the same bus, at the same time these filesystems were NFS-mounted from the cluster-master's floating IP address. The data was written from each cluster node directly by the SCSI bus, but the orchestration, the inode tables, where written by the NFS-mount from each cluster member. Later versions added support for processor and memory affinity to support their high-end multiprocessor

NUMA Numa or NUMA may refer to: * Non-uniform memory access (NUMA), in computing Places * Numa Falls, a waterfall in Kootenay National Park, Canada * 15854 Numa, a main-belt asteroid United States * Numa, Indiana * Numa, Iowa * Numa, Oklahoma * ...

AViiON system.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dg Ux Data General UNIX System V 1985 software Discontinued operating systems X86 operating systems