Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 02:36:47AM +0200, Harald Arnesen wrote:
> Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:
> 
> > Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> > sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> > at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> > BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> > penguins have broken this time).
> 
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

MacOS is based on Mach and Mach was a big steaming mess of promises that
were not so much.  Easy for me to say, I haven't written a VM system from
scratch and they did, so credit them for that.  But I've been in a VM
system that was oh so much easier to read and understand, the SunOS 4.x
VM system done by Joe Moran (mojo@sun.com).  That guy had crazy skills,
well beyond mine or anyone else I can think of.  When he quit the story
is that Bill Joy stopped him in the parking lot and offered him crazy
amounts of money to stay.

So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.

The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.