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

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:50:27PM -0500, William Pechter wrote: That's a good, and hard question. One of the nice things about SunOS4 was the VM system and the VFS layer and the VNODE layer. Those were really well thought out. They all, so far as I know, were Bill Joy dreams, but Steve Kleiman was the primary driver of the vnode design but I think Joe Moran was the main coder of all of that. It's one of those things that people copy but don't get right. I think Linux got closer than FreeBSD did. I haven't dug into the FreeBSD kernel in years so who knows, maybe it is fantastic. When I last looked it was lagging way behind SunOS (which isn't fair, Sun was a business and as such had buildings full of motivated people who were making it better. There was a building with just networking people in, we're talking a two story building with I dunno, ~100 offices). They threw more resources at it that FreeBSD has ever had. If you took the ~1992 SunOS and stacked it up against the 2016 FreeBSD, well I would hope that FreeBSD would be better but I wouldn't bet on it across the board. It would certainly have more drivers (and if we're being honest, that's 99% of the work, all this generic kernel stuff is super fun to talk about but all the real coding is in the drivers). I think the more interesting question is would {Free,Net,Open}BSD even exist if there had been a Free SunOS. I'm 100% convinced the answer to that is a resounding no.