A weird thing about Xenix is that it used the Microsoft C compiler, including COFF format object files. I didn't try it, but I'm pretty sure you could cross compile to MS-DOS with it.
Anonther thing I remember is that floppy driver was terrible- the interleave was incorrect for it, so pretty much one block per disk rotation. People forget, but a big reason for early Linux success was addressing issues like this.
Oh, and the filesystem used a linked-list for the free blocks. Basically you had instant fragmentation.
> "People forget, but a big reason for early Linux success was addressing issues like this."
Xenix wasn't even something people cared about anymore when Linux 0.0.1 came out, aside from legacy installations. The big commercial UNIXes like SunOS (the Solaris rebranding hadn't occurred yet), HP-UX, AIX, etc. were what Linux was competing against.
Anonther thing I remember is that floppy driver was terrible- the interleave was incorrect for it, so pretty much one block per disk rotation. People forget, but a big reason for early Linux success was addressing issues like this.
Oh, and the filesystem used a linked-list for the free blocks. Basically you had instant fragmentation.