[TUHS] BSD History Was: Shell control through external commands

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

Forwarded with permission.

On Sunday, 18 September 2016 at  9:07:45 -0700, Kirk McKusick wrote:
> On Monday, 12 September 2016 at 11:33:48 +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) wrote:
>>
>>> I don't think the BSD kernel when adopted had much, if any,
>>> of sockets, Berkeley's TCP/IP, McKusick's FFS; if it did,
>>> they were excised.  Likewise any remaining trace of V7's
>>> mpx(2) multiplexed-file IPC.
>>
>> From looking at the CSRG sources, it seems that the filesystem
>> project has been founded by Bill Joy and Kirk approached the project
>> a year (or more) later and implemented only the parts that are
>> related to the block allocation.
>>
>> Does someone know more?
>>
>> Joerg
>
> The 4.1a distribution had the initial socket interface with a
> prerelease of the BBN TCP/IP under it. There was wide distribution
> of 4.1a. The 4.1b distribution had the fast filesystem added and
> a more mature socket interface (notably the listen/accept model
> added by Sam Leffler). There was very limited distribution of 4.1b.
> The 4.1c distribution had the finishing touches on the socket
> interface and added the rename system call to the filesystem.
> It also added the reliable signal interface. There was very wide
> distribution of 4.1c as there was a 9-month delay in the distribution
> of 4.2BSD while DARPA, BBN, and Berkeley debated whether the prerelease
> of BBN's TCP/IP should be replaced with BBN's finished version. In
> the end the TCP/IP was not replaced as it had had so much field
> testing and improvement by the folks running the BSD releases that
> it was deemed more performant and reliable. There had been a plan
> to release 4.1d that would have the new virtual memory (mmap)
> interface, but the delay in getting out 4.2BSD caused that addition
> to be delayed for the 4.3BSD release.
>
> As far as the filesystem is concerned, Bill Joy had done an initial
> design primarily coming up with the idea of cylinder groups as a
> way to distribute the block and inode bitmaps across the disk in
> manageable size pieces. When he handed the project off to me I
> received a single header file that defined his prototype for the
> superblock and the cylinder group structures. I did all of the
> coding from there with Bill doing design review. My feedback from
> the folks at the labs was that they were not interested in incorporating
> the fast filesystem because it tripled the size of the filesystem
> code (from 400 to 1200 lines) and because it needlessly put
> functionality into the kernel that could be done in userland
> (mkdir/rmdir/rename which together were 400 of the 1200 lines of code).
>
> 	Kirk McKusick

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