[TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project

AT&T wanted to monetise all work across the window. Personally, like a lot of other ex BSD admin in a uni people I had strong opinion, and I disliked the experience of SysV which was a mixture of unfamiliarity, and bullshit process overlay. I think when you put "but only for money" combined with "this is not how I think" combined with "sorry, your bug is not going to be important to us" combined with "thats not how AT&T thinks" it was profoundly de-motivating for people to cohere around. It is entirely tenable that at the time, a SysV kernel was "best of breed" but also, in the period. all the exciting work on the network stack was happening in Van Jacobsen's group, in BSD kernels. It was only later when he moved to Google, the pace of work in kernel network stack moved to Linux. Since then, BBR has been a low adoption path, painful in the extreme, driven by Netflix engineers in BSD. We now have 4 or 5 competing models to TCP flow management, and they don't play nice, so its not only kernel fragmentation, its kernel-featureset-richness fragmentation: inside a kernel, you have too many tunables to think about. Same with ZFS. Amazing system. At one point, the meme "it needs >4GB memory" escaped & people said "you can't run this on a rpi" which is factually incorrect, as much as "needs > 4GB" is also incorrect: it works BETTER with a huge arc, and de-dupe burns memory, but if you don't run de-dupe, you can run ZFS fine on smaller memory model machines. But the number of tunables... Oh my gosh. Kernels might be good: they're also horrendously complex now. -G