Unix can work just fine without most of the features you seem
to think it needs. It's not hard to find foreign filesystems
that have at least 14-character Unix filenames and multiple
timestamps. There are Unix filesystems that don't have atime
and inodes, such as Reiserfs. Those "features" are junk.
Some systems have the NTFS filesystem, which Linux can read.
NTFS supports atime, mtime, ctime, and creation time. It has
long case sensitive filenames (yes, really) in Unicode. It has
hard links and inodes. You could run Linux on NTFS.
C:\usr C:\etc C:\mnt C:\var C:\tmp
Everything can be read-only, which is great for the current
NTFS driver. Mount /tmp, /var, and /home over SMB from an NT server.
Authenticate against NT, using '*' in /etc/passwd. This could
really work, but /dev is a problem.
>> *** Read-only filesystems ***
>> [ .. ] The Linux root filesystem can not be read-only because the
>> normal /dev must be read-write to allow tty ownership changes.
>
> No to mention utmp, wtmp, any sort of logging, etc.
Those all go in /var now. See the Linux filesystem standard.
>> *** NTFS ***
> non-unix file system.
Correct. NTFS is nearly a perfect superset of the Unix, Mac,
and OS/2 filesystems. Only /dev is missing.