Re: [TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

I'm going to rant a little here, George, this is not to you, it's to
the topic.

You are correct but a lot of us learned from a uniprocessor kernel.
I certainly did.

So there is MP and then there is MP.  SGI redid all of their kernel
structs so that the most important stuff was on the same cache line.
The 1980's and 1990's talked about SMP and then there was a whole series
of papers that talked about cache affinity which was geek speak for the
S in SMP wasn't.

It's just layers and layers of more complexity.  Which we can talk about
and us older folks want to say isn't needed.  We're wrong.

I'm with Ted. [1]  He's active in the Linux kernel, has been for a
long time, he's someone that I know is better than me at kernel stuff.
He has kept up, so far as I can tell, when there is yet another layer
of something, he's a guy that goes and digs into that something and
learns about it, reasons about it, weighs the tradeoffs.  He is NOT
a guy that just shoves stuff into the kernel on a whim.  He thinks,
he does the tradeoffs.  And he is here saying well, what do you want?
You want all the stuff you have or are you willing to go run in v7?

Who among us is running v7, or some other kernel that we all love
because we understand it?  I'd venture a guess that it is noone.
We like our X11, we like that we can do "make -j" and you can build
a kernel in a minute or two, we like our web browsers, we like a lot
of stuff that if you look at it from the lens "but it should be simple",
but that lens doesn't give us what we want.

I get it.  I love the clean simple lines that were the original Unix 
but we live in a more complex world.  Ted is straddling those lines
and he's doing the best he can and his best is pretty darn good.

I'd argue listen to Ted.  He's got the balance.

--lm

[1] Truth in advertising, Ted and I are friends, we used to hike together
in Pacifica, we like each other.  

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 11:52:21AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
> I won't dispute your age, or how many layers of pearl are on the seed
> Larry, but MP unix was a thing long long ago.
> 
> I am pretty sure it was written up in BSTJ, and there was Pyramid by
> 1984/5 and an MP unix system otherwise running at Melbourne University
> (Rob Elz) around 1988.
> 
> You might be ancient, but you weren't THAT ancient in the 1980s.
> 
> anyway, pearls before swine, and age before beauty.
> 
> -G

-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm