From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: wes.parish@paradise.net.nz (Wesley Parish) Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2017 16:00:06 +1300 (NZDT) Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines In-Reply-To: <20170105010148.GC6931@mcvoy.com> References: <20170104024127.GN12264@mcvoy.com> <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> <20170105004353.GB6931@mcvoy.com> <4c14e37a-f959-d625-b877-f498a644415c@gmail.com> <20170105010148.GC6931@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <1483585206.586db6b64f706@www.paradise.net.nz> Quoting Larry McVoy : > On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:50:27PM -0500, William Pechter wrote: > > Where would the current FreeBSD be if you compared it with SunOS4? > > That's a good, and hard question. One of the nice things about SunOS4 > was the VM system and the VFS layer and the VNODE layer. Those were > really well thought out. They all, so far as I know, were Bill Joy > dreams, but Steve Kleiman was the primary driver of the vnode design > but I think Joe Moran was the main coder of all of that. It's one of > those things that people copy but don't get right. I think Linux got > closer than FreeBSD did. > > I haven't dug into the FreeBSD kernel in years so who knows, maybe > it is fantastic. When I last looked it was lagging way behind SunOS > (which isn't fair, Sun was a business and as such had buildings full of > motivated people who were making it better. There was a building with > just networking people in, we're talking a two story building with I > dunno, ~100 offices). They threw more resources at it that FreeBSD has > ever had. > > If you took the ~1992 SunOS and stacked it up against the 2016 FreeBSD, > well I would hope that FreeBSD would be better but I wouldn't bet on it > across the board. It would certainly have more drivers (and if we're > being honest, that's 99% of the work, all this generic kernel stuff > is super fun to talk about but all the real coding is in the drivers). > > I think the more interesting question is would {Free,Net,Open}BSD even > exist if there had been a Free SunOS. I'm 100% convinced the answer > to that is a resounding no. > My understanding which was that of an interested layman in 1991 and just bitten by the bug, and based upon the comments of some of the computer science staff of the U of Canterbury, NZ, at that time, is that 386BSD held everybody's attention. (I mentioned in 1992 reading about Linux in a computer mag to one of them and he told me 386BSD was where the action was.) i80386 PCs were relatively cheap, BSD was (relatively) free from AT&T's legal claims, and 386BSD was even freer and targeted that cheap powerhorse. My guess is that if Sun had spun off a Free SunOS, it would've been ported to the 386. What would've happened then is anyone's guess. Wesley Parish "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor, Method for Guitar "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn