VenturCom Inc the Cambridge, Massachusetts company that specialises in the skinniest implementations of Unix – it had one for 8088-based personal computers – has begun shipping its Venix/386 real-time pre-emptable Unix kernel for iAPX-86-based systems. Based on System V.3.2, it includes MS-DOS under Unix, Network File System, TCP/IP, the X Window System and OSF/Motif, as well as real-time device drivers for analogue-to-digital, digital-to-analogue, IEEE-488, Stepper Motor and Digital input-output devices. Real-time features include fixed priority and biased scheduling, asynchronous and direct input-output, contiguous file system, access to direct memory access buffers and physical memory, and fast timers. The contiguous file system is claimed to increase disk performance by more than 150% for disk-intensive applications. The company gave no prices.
