[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 06:39:25PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > > I cannot confirm this at all.
> > > 
> > > I have access to both SunOS-4.x and Solaris sources and it is obvious that the 
> >
> > I'm not sure how you have legal access to the SunOS 4.x code.  I'd love a
> > copy of that source but so far as I know it's locked up.
> 
> You did not make a backup while you worked at Sun?

Apparently your ethics and my ethics differ.  It was Sun's property, not mine.

> 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.

> There seems to be a general missunderstandings:
> 
> I do not call SunOS-4.x a "BSD based OS" as SunOS-4.0 introduced a new memory 
> management subsystem in the kernel. 

I think we can stop here.  The rest of the world at the time described
SunOS as "a bug fixed BSD".  The mmap() interface was designed by Bill
Joy while at UCB and was documented but not implemented in 4.2 BSD [*]

To say that SunOS 4.x wasn't BSD based is ludicrous.  And that's coming
from the guy who made it conform to POSIX and in the process wrote lint
libraries for SunOS, BSD, Posix, and System V.  

You're arguing with someone who was in the kernel group at Sun at the time
and is close friends with the guy who did the bringup.  I'm not sure you
could get a better source but if you want to keep pushing your version of
history I'll be here to point out where you get it wrong.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmap

Though that wiki page is suspect, did 4.3BSD-Reno really have the Mach
VM system?