[Info-vax] FreeAXP loses network connectivity when laptop is woken up from "sleep"

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-05-15 11.23, John Wallace wrote:
> On May 15, 1:55 pm, m.krae... at gsi.de (Michael Kraemer) wrote:
>> In article<bed0d406-2f99-4d52-bfa1-26626f7dd... at z19g2000vbe.googlegroups.com>,
>>
>> John Wallace<johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk>  writes:
>>> 2) The strange "file is there, file is not there" behaviour is a
>>> feature introduced in Vista. It's related to apps that want to write
>>> files to system-protected directories. When such a write happens in
>>> Vista or later, it doesn't end up in the real system directory, there
>>> is a shadow directory elsewhere that will get the file, that *some*
>>> (but not all) APIs know about. It's a band-aid on an elastoplast to
>>> work around a Defective by Design security model, but this is Windows.
>>
>> Wasn't Windows designed by Himself (aka D.Cutler)?
>
> Not correct, even if you were referring specifically to the NT flavour
> of Windows.
>
> WNT's kernel stuff, process architecture, etc has some VAXELN
> heritage. VAXELN was a not particularly well known (even inside DEC)
> Cutler project for a distributable RT OS which would feel comfortable
> for VMS programmers without being VMS, and allow distributed RT
> applications to be developed without need to understand low level
> hardware specifics and OS kernel interface details. VAXELN
> incorporated early examples of a process model which also incorporated
> threads, and a nice approach to interprocess data sharing (a
> distributed naming service, transparent messaging between apps whether
> on the same node or separate, etc). Marvellous stuff, some of which
> duly made its way into NT, though many writers understandably missed
> the VAXELN connection (it is briefly mentioned in Custer's book
> "Inside Windows NT").
>
> Unfortunately, Gates didn't like the fact that the robustness and
> security made possible by things like the multiple protected address
> spaces in VAXELN (and in any other worthwhile OS) meant that for some
> benchmarks, WNT was slower than W98 on the same hardware (because of
> things like the increased number of context switches, mode changes
> etc). Productivity goes up as robustness goes up but isn't so easy to
> demonstrate as frame rates on a game or other silly benchmark. So
> Gates got the team to move quite a bit of code from user mode to
> kernel mode, processes started using shared memory rather than
> messaging, etc. Thereby increasing performance but inevitably also
> decreasing robustness, as accidents were no longer confined to a
> single process.
>
> That's one aspect relevant here.
>
> Another aspect of the defectiveness by design referred to earlier is
> that Gates wanted the new OS to provide transparent compatibility with
> existing applications but seemingly didn't understand the security
> implications of that (why would he care anyway?). Consequently, random
> apps were allowed to write pretty much where they wanted, because
> that's what they'd always been able to do on Windows. Applications
> couldn't do that on RSX or VMS or even VAXELN, OSes which all had some
> concept of security.
>
> Windows had previously had no concept of security, and therefore, for
> compatibility with that legacy, neither did the Gatesified WNT.
>
> WNT was not, is not, and never will be VMS++.

I think this is pretty correct, as far as it goes, except that it's not 
frmo VAXELN, but a project called Prism, that Cutler worked on at DEC 
before moving to MS.

(See third paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11)

	Johnny