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

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:23:12PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > > 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.

So I've asked around and I can't find anyone who has read that thesis.
The ZFS guys started on ZFS long before any of them had heard of you.

As for your claims that SVr4 is based on SunOS, here's what the guy who
did the bring up had to say (spoiler, it's exactly what I told you):

    SVr4 was not based on SunOS, although it incorporated many of the best
    features of SunOS 4.x (VM management, filesystem architecture, shared
    libraries, etc). Those features and interfaces were merged (after extensive
    discussions, involving, on the Sun side, Bill Shannon, Rob Gingell, Don
    Cragun and others) into a pre-release version of System V by AT&T. The
    reference hardware platform was AT&T's 3b2.

    Sun would receive periodic "loads" from AT&T of that 3b2 based code,
    which we then merged on top of the machine-dependent code from SunOS 4.x.
    Let's just say it was an adventure. After the first port, I think, Joe
    Kowalski came on to head the userland effort, and the team gradually built
    up from there. That merged code was Sun proprietary stuff; AFAIK it never
    went back to AT&T.

I could go into your comments about Bill Joy implementing mmap but I cracked
open the 4.2BSD release notes and it said that it was unimplemented.

Let's move on to more productive conversations.  I love the history that is
in this group.