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[Doug McIlroy]

[TUHS] long lived programs (was Re: RIP John Backus
> Every year someone takes some young hotshot and points them at some
"impossible" thing and one of them makes it work.  I don't see that
changing.

Case in point.
We hired Tom Killian, a young high-energy physicist  disenchanted
with contributing to hundred-author papers. He'd done plenty of
instrument programming, but no operating systems. So, high-energy
as he was, he cooked up an exercise to get his feet wet.

The result: /proc

Doug

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[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 09:26:29PM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> [TUHS] long lived programs (was Re: RIP John Backus
> > Every year someone takes some young hotshot and points them at some
> "impossible" thing and one of them makes it work.  I don't see that
> changing.
> 
> Case in point.
> We hired Tom Killian, a young high-energy physicist  disenchanted
> with contributing to hundred-author papers. He'd done plenty of
> instrument programming, but no operating systems. So, high-energy
> as he was, he cooked up an exercise to get his feet wet.
> 
> The result: /proc

Didn't Roger Faulkner have something to do with that?  Or did he come 
after?

I ask because Roger and I were friends, so I'm always curious about his
history.  How we became friends is some folklore from Sun, it was when
Solaris was a thing so it was SysV based and it had /proc.  I had some
question about /proc and I heard Roger was the guy, he was pretty much 
directly under me in building 5, I went down and kind of hung out in
his doorway waiting for him to look up.  Nothing.  10 minutes later,
nothing, he's staring intently at his screen and working, I might as
well have been invisible.

So I go into his office and sit on his desk.

Without looking up he says something like "who the hell are you and what
do you want?".

"I want to ask you a question"

"And why should I answer?"

"Because I'm going to sit on your desk and belch and fart until you do"

He leaned back, roared with laughter, and we became friends right there.

He's left us, I still miss him.  Huge nerd, cared deeply about doing the
right thing in the code.

--lm

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[Michael-John Turner]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 01:54:36AM +0000, Larry McVoy wrote:
>Didn't Roger Faulkner have something to do with that?  Or did he come
>after?

I mistakenly thought /proc was Roger Faulkner's creation. A little bit of 
digging turned up this reasonable summary: 
https://blogs.oracle.com/eschrock/a-brief-history-of-proc

The best part is that it contains the references to the original papers
(links added by me):
T. J. Killian. Processes as Files. Proceedings of the USENIX Software Tools 
Users Group Summer Conference, pp 203-207, June 1984 [1]

R. Faulkner and R. Gomes. The Process File System and Process Model in UNIX 
System V. USENIX Conference Proceedings. Dallas, Texas. January 1991 [2]

[1] http://lucasvr.gobolinux.org/etc/Killian84-Procfs-USENIX.pdf
[2] https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/usenix_winter91_faulkner.pdf

Cheers, MJ
-- 
Michael-John Turner * mj at mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/ 

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[Doug McIlroy]

Re: [TUHS] Kernel Sizes

> I've often thought that LSX was V5 'regressed' to the concepts of
> V1, which was facing similar hardware constraints. Is that a
> reasonable view?

> LSX has a maximum of three processes that are swapped
> in and out in a stack-like fashion. Only one process is ever in core.
> Is that how V1 was organized?

The rocess limit was higher in V1. And V1 was a time-sharing
system; for which LIFO swapping is inappropriate. So LSX
seems to have "regressed" to some pre-Unix state.

doug