Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 16th Jan 2006 19:06 UTC, submitted by anonymous
"UWIN or Unix for WINdows, is developed and released by AT&T Laboratories and David Korn - the creator of Korn shell. UWin basically consists of a set of tools and libraries which helps application developers compile and run Unix applications natively on windows. The tools include a complete shell (Korn Shell) for Windows which is bundled with all the command line tools you find in Linux/Unix."
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Member since:
2006-01-23
Microsoft Services for UNIX (SFU) and the newer Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) are different from UWIN (or cygwin for that matter) in one very significant way. UWIN and Cygwin are both Win32 implementations of the UNIX APIs, essentially emulating (via shims and other tricks) the UNIX environment and APIs. SFU and SUA take a different approach, implementing the UNIX APIs and services as a separate (but equal) subsystem within Windows.
There any many consequences of this difference and depending on your needs, one solution or the other will suit your needs. For instance, if your UNIX-based application performs lots of fork's and exec's (essentially spawning lots of processes), then SFU/SUA may deliver better performance, since they use the native implementation of fork/exec where UWIN and Cygwin have to emulate this behaviour using the Win32 APIs. In the past with SFU, there have been instances where using something like Cygwin or MKS is a better solution and SFU. Some of those situations will change with SUA, since there are some pretty significant changes to the capabilities that SUA bring with WIndows Server 2003 R2 and Vista.
Either way, each to his own. SUA is now part of the Windows Server shipping product and SFU continues to be a free download, so choose accordingly. You can also visit http://www.interopsystems.com for a list of additional tools and libraries that extend the functionality of SFU beyond the packaged CD. And, contrary to what other's have posted, there is more to the SUA functionality than NFS (which isn't actually part of the SUA). Explore the Windows Server 2003 R2 Disk 2 (hey, R2D2!) and install the separate SUA components.
There's some good information on SFU and SUA available though http://www.windowsforunixpros.com