From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2017 17:37:15 -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: <20170108013715.GV16253@mcvoy.com> On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:23:12PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Larry McVoy wrote: > > > Hint: I have been told > > > from Sun employees that the Sun ZFS group did read my diploma thesis before > > > they started with ZFS even though it is written in German ;-) > > > > Huh, interesting. I'll check that out. Both Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore > > have worked for me. Bonwick was one of my students at Stanford and I > > hired him into the kernel group. Bill worked for me on BitKeeper. > > I'll let you know what they say. So I've asked around and I can't find anyone who has read that thesis. The ZFS guys started on ZFS long before any of them had heard of you. As for your claims that SVr4 is based on SunOS, here's what the guy who did the bring up had to say (spoiler, it's exactly what I told you): SVr4 was not based on SunOS, although it incorporated many of the best features of SunOS 4.x (VM management, filesystem architecture, shared libraries, etc). Those features and interfaces were merged (after extensive discussions, involving, on the Sun side, Bill Shannon, Rob Gingell, Don Cragun and others) into a pre-release version of System V by AT&T. The reference hardware platform was AT&T's 3b2. Sun would receive periodic "loads" from AT&T of that 3b2 based code, which we then merged on top of the machine-dependent code from SunOS 4.x. Let's just say it was an adventure. After the first port, I think, Joe Kowalski came on to head the userland effort, and the team gradually built up from there. That merged code was Sun proprietary stuff; AFAIK it never went back to AT&T. I could go into your comments about Bill Joy implementing mmap but I cracked open the 4.2BSD release notes and it said that it was unimplemented. Let's move on to more productive conversations. I love the history that is in this group.