[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Thu Jan 5 04:44:48 AEST 2017
On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:23:12PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> BTW: in order to avoid more missunderstandings, could you mention when you have
> been in the Sun kernel group and what kind of things you did with the kernel?
Sure. Here's some notes I put together for Eli Lamb when I was thinking
about moving to Dec (to work for Jim Gray). The date on the file is
1992 so I had been there about 4 years. I was in the kernel group from
1988 to about 1992, then moved over to hardware where I did a cluster
based NFS server and LMbench. Then I went to SGI and did a new name
server that could serve all of California on a 200 mhz server, made
NFS deliver serve up files at 60MB/sec per file (we could do as many
streams in parallel as we had network cards).
--lm
I showed up in October 1988. This is what I can remember that I've done
since I've been here. When I interviewed at DEC, their HR people thought
I was lieing and I went through two more interviews before they finally
believed me.
* Doubled file system throughput. Publication. Generated sales. Talk to
Steve Kleiman for confirmation.
* Single handly implemented POSIX conformance in the 4.x OS. Bullet item
on lots of sales. Talk to Don Cragun for confirmation.
* Implemented smoosh - basis for Avocet and nselite. Talk to Shannon for
confirmation.
* Implemented nselite - almost *all* kernel devlopment on 5.0 and 4.x
is currently under nselite. Nselite has saved manyears of time (see
Karl Danz and Larry Bassel for mgmt confirmation; Len Brown & Roger
Faulkner for engineering confirmation; I also have statistics of
usage: nselite is more widely used than the NSE or Avocet).
* VM, swap, tmpfs performance. I improved tmpfs write rates from 300KB to
7MB / second. Talk to Howard Chartok, Steve Kleiman, Peter Snyder for
confirmation.
* STREAMS, tty enhancements. Done under POSIX but had nothing to do
with POSIX.
* Porting tools for SunOS 4.x to any known Unix implementation. Talk to
Rob Gingell for confirmation.
* More fires in the kernel than I care to think about. I can run through
bug traq to find these, many are boring, but all consumed substantial
time. I have somewhat of a reputation of a kernel hack largely because
of these firedrills.
* Designed and built the first Sun clustered system, Sunbox. Hired and
managed a team.
* Taught two Quarters of Graduate level OS at Stanford while working full
time at Sun. TA-ed the same course before that, Stanford ask me to teach
it when Bob Hagmann retired.
* Extensive consulting with other groups:
- Lisp people, VM issues, Cris Perdue.
- Fortran crowd, I/O issues, Robert Corbett.
- SWSMON - kernel tuning, Anh Nuygun.
- Dragon crowd I/O issues, SCSI performance, Jean-Marc Frailong.
- Pluto people picked up many of the ideas in the SCSI card proposal,
Dave Banks.
- Avocet crowd is picking up all the positive ideas in nselite due to
my team player efforts with them. Talk to Marla and Giordano for
confirmation.
- Okins group, SunBox, Okin for confirmation.
- Mike Scott, HA NFS.
- Disk performance, Rich Clewett.
- Performance benchmarking, etc, Nhan Chu & group.
- Big memory systems, Bill Peterson.
- NFS group, performance, cache consistency, John Corbin.
- UFS crowd, delayed I/O, quickcheck, Tom Wong, Blake Lewis.
- SMCC, presto, omni, SCSI.
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