[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 12:50:18PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> So it seems that you worked on code for SunOS-4.x but not on code for SunOS-5.x.

That's not true, Sunbox was all 5.x code.  I spent about 3 years in the
5.x source base.

> I worked on code for the SunOS-4.x kernel and for the SunOS-5.x kernel and I 
> ported drivers from SunOS-4.x to SunOS.5-x, so I am pretty sure about what I 
> write and you may have gotten your impression because you did not compare the 
> code we are talking about now.

You've been arguing with a guy who was in the kernel group and I've tried to
set you straight and you just keep coming back with misinformation.

> Because you worked on filesystem throughput, you should know the new memory 
> subsystem from SunOS-4.x well....This is a big part of the SunOS-4.x kernel and 
> if you check the OpenSolaris kernel sources with your knowledge of the 
> SunOS-4.x kernel, you should be able to confirm my statements.

The VM system was ported from SunOS 4.x to System 5.  Your statements that
SVr4 is based on SunOS are flat out wrong.  SVr4 got a lot of SunOS goodness
but the starting point was ATT System V.

> > * Implemented smoosh - basis for Avocet and nselite.  Talk to Shannon for
> >   confirmation.
> 
> Interesting: Do you mean "Bill Shannon"? Was he involved in SCCS or smoosh
> as well? I know Bill as the author of "cstyle" and I pushed him to make it OSS
> in 2001 already, before it appeared in OpenSolaris.

Yup, that Shannon.

> In January 2015, I talked with Glenn Skinner about SCCS and smoosh and he 
> pointed me to his smoosh patent:
> 
> 	http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US5481722.pdf
> 
> that has been expired in late 2014. 

The fact that Glenn didn't put me on that patent is a sore point.  Yes,
he wrote the lisp code that showed it could be done.  I wrote the C code
that did that in one pass (his stuff was N+M where N was how many deltas
were on the local side and M was how deltas were on the remote side).

--lm