12 Mar
2019
12 Mar
'19
6:44 p.m.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Other than for history's sake, I don't see
the value of 4.1, it wasn't
a great release (even though Masscomp did their changes to 4.1c if I
remember correctly. Clem?). 4.2 was the first release that I remember
being pretty solid and 4.3 improved on that.
I'm with Clem; we ran 4.1 at Georgia Tech and it was pretty solid.
The big changes in 4.2 were the fast file system, the networking, and
how signals worked.
The fast file system used more space on the disk for its metadata;
people who had nearly full disks on 4.1 didn't have enough room to
restore their filesystems with the change to 4.2!
Later on I ran two vaxen at the Emory U computing center with 4.2; they
were heavily (over)loaded. When 4.3 came out it had a huge amount of fixes
and performance tuning; when we switched to 4.3 + NFS from Mt. Xinu we
saw a big drop in the load. To this day I am convinced that the move to
4.3 kept us from having to buy more hardware.
Arnold