From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 10:44:48 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines In-Reply-To: <586d3d90.oAzCBIUMx+CcWar6%schily@schily.net> References: <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> <586d234d.vf4JCu1Ye3gumwfc%schily@schily.net> <20170104164630.GA3405@mcvoy.com> <586d2abb.A5j4GovJtyzlD+AQ%schily@schily.net> <20170104171033.GC3405@mcvoy.com> <586d334d.XcKOxzKwrzmvL326%schily@schily.net> <20170104175227.GH3405@mcvoy.com> <586d3d90.oAzCBIUMx+CcWar6%schily@schily.net> Message-ID: <20170104184448.GD3006@mcvoy.com> On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:23:12PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: > BTW: in order to avoid more missunderstandings, could you mention when you have > been in the Sun kernel group and what kind of things you did with the kernel? Sure. Here's some notes I put together for Eli Lamb when I was thinking about moving to Dec (to work for Jim Gray). The date on the file is 1992 so I had been there about 4 years. I was in the kernel group from 1988 to about 1992, then moved over to hardware where I did a cluster based NFS server and LMbench. Then I went to SGI and did a new name server that could serve all of California on a 200 mhz server, made NFS deliver serve up files at 60MB/sec per file (we could do as many streams in parallel as we had network cards). --lm I showed up in October 1988. This is what I can remember that I've done since I've been here. When I interviewed at DEC, their HR people thought I was lieing and I went through two more interviews before they finally believed me. * Doubled file system throughput. Publication. Generated sales. Talk to Steve Kleiman for confirmation. * Single handly implemented POSIX conformance in the 4.x OS. Bullet item on lots of sales. Talk to Don Cragun for confirmation. * Implemented smoosh - basis for Avocet and nselite. Talk to Shannon for confirmation. * Implemented nselite - almost *all* kernel devlopment on 5.0 and 4.x is currently under nselite. Nselite has saved manyears of time (see Karl Danz and Larry Bassel for mgmt confirmation; Len Brown & Roger Faulkner for engineering confirmation; I also have statistics of usage: nselite is more widely used than the NSE or Avocet). * VM, swap, tmpfs performance. I improved tmpfs write rates from 300KB to 7MB / second. Talk to Howard Chartok, Steve Kleiman, Peter Snyder for confirmation. * STREAMS, tty enhancements. Done under POSIX but had nothing to do with POSIX. * Porting tools for SunOS 4.x to any known Unix implementation. Talk to Rob Gingell for confirmation. * More fires in the kernel than I care to think about. I can run through bug traq to find these, many are boring, but all consumed substantial time. I have somewhat of a reputation of a kernel hack largely because of these firedrills. * Designed and built the first Sun clustered system, Sunbox. Hired and managed a team. * Taught two Quarters of Graduate level OS at Stanford while working full time at Sun. TA-ed the same course before that, Stanford ask me to teach it when Bob Hagmann retired. * Extensive consulting with other groups: - Lisp people, VM issues, Cris Perdue. - Fortran crowd, I/O issues, Robert Corbett. - SWSMON - kernel tuning, Anh Nuygun. - Dragon crowd I/O issues, SCSI performance, Jean-Marc Frailong. - Pluto people picked up many of the ideas in the SCSI card proposal, Dave Banks. - Avocet crowd is picking up all the positive ideas in nselite due to my team player efforts with them. Talk to Marla and Giordano for confirmation. - Okins group, SunBox, Okin for confirmation. - Mike Scott, HA NFS. - Disk performance, Rich Clewett. - Performance benchmarking, etc, Nhan Chu & group. - Big memory systems, Bill Peterson. - NFS group, performance, cache consistency, John Corbin. - UFS crowd, delayed I/O, quickcheck, Tom Wong, Blake Lewis. - SMCC, presto, omni, SCSI.