On Mon, Nov 05, 2018 at 11:38:50AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > OK, found some slides:
> >
> > http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/lamed.pdf
>
> That was quite interesting!! Very impressive.  Did the reference
> port ever get contributed to Linux?  It looks like a nice architecture.

Yeah, it was sort of overkill for the problem space, but it seemed
like the right answer.  Very much inspired by the vnode/vfs interface
I learned in SunOS.

The caches worked across reboots.  I left not long after we completed 1.0,
Bob Mende (RIP) and some other folks took the mmap based dbm (I called
mdbm) and put locks in each page so you could have multiple writers.
That code made its way to yahoo and just got used for everything, they
made it C++ (not a fan of that but whatever) and evolved it farther than
I ever imagined.  They had DBs that were 100's of gigs ~20 years ago.
They open sourced their stuff.

I'm not sure if SGI ever open sourced it, be a shame if they didn't.
Though the need for a YP server that scales to the entire world is
not so clear to me.  But you could do it.