[TUHS] 386BSD released

[Richard Salz]

Anyone remember the old mtXinu calendar with fake ads?I only remember one
page, "oh no Spot(?) spilled the mbufs, Dad's favorite cereal."

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 4:19 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 3:08 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Yup was just going to say this is standard in the modern BSD network
>> drivers, looks like Clem says it's older.
>
> Absolutely -- I believe it was Rob's undergrad project at Brown that he
> brought to BBN.
>
> The first use, if I saw, was the 'portable IP/TCP' stack  BBN did for
> HP/3000 and a couple of other systems.  That code seems to have been lost.
> I have asked about it on the Internet history mailing list.  I had a copy
> of it one time, but sadly I don't think I still do.  IIRC The original
> PDP-11 IP implementation which ran on a couple of dedicated systems,
> whose names/function I frankly do not remember) was also based on a version
> of this code.  I think it ran something like RT-11 or DOS-11 and then
> started the IP code -- basically RTR style today.   Later it morphed into
> Rob's Vax BSD  4.1 specific stack,  which we ran at UCB on a couple of the
> systems using 3M Xerox board.  This latest until 4.1A and Joy's rewrite and
> I want to say we switched in Interlan 10M boards then.  We have a couple of
> the 3Com boards, but because of the lack of buffering, they were a bear to
> use and stopped as soon as we got the Interlan one.
>
>
> Anyway, all of these IP/TCP stacks used Rob's mbuf code.  Which was a
> blessing and a curse.  By writing his own, he avoids huge
> changes/integration into the memory system, but it also helped to make BSD
> such a mess under the covers because there were so many private memory
> managers between the network, the I/O systems etc...  As discussed
> previously on the TUHS list, the one thing Risner really did well had a
> uniform memory design.   Later BSD's moved to Mach and tried to clean this
> up a little, but the network code was by then so screwed into Rob's mbuf
> scheme, it stayed around a long time.  Werner -- what is the state of this
> these days in FreeBSD is it still there?
>
>
>
>
>> There are recent optimizations to help the CPU with prefetch, and some
>> ideas around vectors of mbufs.  What's remarkable is the mbuf design
>> scales to
>> 200gbps in practice, it must feel great to design something like that so
>> long ago :)
>>
> Well, ask Rob :-)  I've lost track of him since Stellar, and I think he I
> heard he left high tech but frankly don't know.
>
> Clem
> ᐧ
>
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