4 Sep
2018
4 Sep
'18
3:39 p.m.
On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
Well, there are certainly as many sides to this story as there are people
involved. Same with NetBSD/OpenBSD split. Let's leave it as that as I
don't believe we have mentioned people on this list so they can't defend
themselves.
--Andy
On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are
missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.
I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining
about FreeBSD VM in 1994
It used to be downright aweful.
or so.
I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD
improved their Mach one (which
OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not
seen complaints about modern BSD.
Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by
John Dyson and David Greenman in
the mid-late 90's? And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore. All
three had exceptional coding skills.
With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
has done well with DragonFly, however.