On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system.  Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing.  Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code. 
Everything else seems like a mess to me.

That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.

I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach which did have problems at first. 

I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994 or so.

I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
 

Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in the mid-late 90's?  And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.

Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore.  All three had exceptional coding skills.

--Andy