5 Jan
2017
5 Jan
'17
12:44 a.m.
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.